Spotify, valued at about $US99 billion, sits at the centre of the streaming economy and now at the front line of AI abuse. The platform receives roughly 100,000 new songs every day, a growing share of which are created by artificial intelligence rather than human musicians. These tracks are often produced at industrial scale to exploit how streaming royalties are calculated and paid out. Spotify’s leadership for global artists, marketing and policy frames the issue as a direct threat to how musicians get paid.
Spotify has built a dedicated internal team focused on identifying and removing low-quality or fraudulent AI content from its catalogue. The company says it has already taken down about 75 million spam tracks, a number that shows the sheer volume of AI “slop” hitting the service. Detection efforts now blend technical tools with policy enforcement to catch patterns such as mass-uploaded near-identical tracks and artificially inflated streams. Artists and labels are increasingly focused on how to distinguish creative AI-assisted music from opportunistic spam.
Spotify’s campaign against AI spam sits within a broader scramble across the music industry to adapt royalty systems to machine-made content. The company is positioning itself as both a tech innovator and a gatekeeper, trying to keep its vast catalogue usable for listeners and profitable for legitimate artists. Its meetings this week with Australian labels and policymakers show how national regulators are being drawn into what once looked like a purely technical platform problem.
