Spotify will flag AI artists and hold them back from recommendations

Spotify will start labeling artist profiles whose identity may be AI-generated with an "AI Persona" badge from mid-September, Music Business Worldwide reported on August 11. Music carrying the badge will be left out of Spotify's editorial and algorithmic recommendations by default, unless a listener chooses to follow that profile directly.

Artists can self-disclose an AI Persona through Spotify for Artists starting immediately, and the company said it will also use human reviewers and its own detection tools to apply the badge to profiles that were not self-declared. The badge covers an artist's public identity, meaning the name and imagery on a profile, rather than how a given track was made; Spotify pointed listeners to its existing AI Credits and SongDNA features for details on a song's production.

The move follows a run of AI-identity features Spotify has rolled out this year, including Artist Profile Protection in March, SongDNA later that month, and a Verified by Spotify badge in April that excludes AI-persona profiles by design. It also lands alongside an industry-wide push: the RIAA and IFPI proposed voluntary AI-generated and AI-assisted tags in July, and a coalition of major and independent labels set out principles the same month to keep AI-made recordings off official charts unless they are lawfully made and substantially human-made.

Rival platforms have moved on similar lines. Deezer said fully AI-generated tracks made up more than half its daily uploads for the first time in June, at close to 90,000 a day, and Tidal has said it will not pay royalties on fully AI-generated music. The badge arrived alongside a separate push to license Spotify's AI-powered covers and remixes tool through deals with Merlin and, later, the publisher Kobalt.

The policy traces back to last year's Velvet Sundown controversy, when a fully AI-generated act posing as a human band drew millions of streams within weeks and turned up in listeners' Discover Weekly feeds, NPR reported. Spotify has spent the months since cracking down on AI impersonations of real artists and capping AI spam uploads, and the analytics firm Luminate found that listener interest in AI music has been sliding this year, particularly among Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

The badge also lands amid a running argument between the platform and outspoken artists over AI's reach into music. Hundreds of musicians, including Billie Eilish, J Balvin and Stevie Wonder, signed a 2024 open letter warning that AI could infringe on and devalue human artists' work. SZA told i-D in March that she feels "at war" with AI, and Lorde criticized a separate Spotify feature that generates AI summaries of songs, asking last month that artists be allowed to opt out.