Spotify removed 75 million songs. The reason? They weren't recorded by humans.

Streaming giant Spotify is stepping up its fight against music spam, which involves AI-generated tracks being uploaded to its platform. These tracks are flooding Spotify in droves. As the platform announced on its official website, 75 million such tracks have been removed from its catalog.

It will become increasingly difficult for AI-generated tracks impersonating well-known artists to penetrate the Spotify platform. To combat music spam, the platform is improving, among other things, the authorship verification of music uploaded to the service.

"The pace of advancements in generative AI technology seems rapid and at times unsettling—especially for creators. At best, AI opens up incredible new possibilities for artists to create music and for listeners to discover it. At worst, AI could be used by fake creators and content farms to confuse or deceive listeners, injecting 'garbage' into the ecosystem and disrupting the work of genuine artists building their careers. This type of harmful AI-generated content degrades the user experience and is often designed to divert royalties to dishonest creators," Spotify said in a statement.

According to the platform, the future of music is being written before our eyes, and its most important task is to protect artists and producers from the worst effects of artificial intelligence. To this end, it intends to do everything in its power to ensure that artists and producers have control over how AI is used. For its part, the platform promises greater protection against spam, impersonation, cloning of original voices, and fraud.

Spotify also intends to introduce full transparency and encourage artists to inform their listeners about any use of artificial intelligence and how it influenced the final track. Additionally, filters will be introduced to hinder activities aimed at influencing the platform's recommendation system, such as mass uploads, duplicates, and SEO hacking. Tracks that use such methods will be flagged and excluded from the algorithm responsible for recommending specific songs to listeners.

In July, The Guardian reported on the case of two albums by The Velvet Sundown appearing on Spotify and receiving over a million streams. Only then was it revealed that the group didn't exist and that its songs had been generated by artificial intelligence. However, Spotify hasn't abandoned its use of AI. In February, it approved audiobooks "read" by AI. This approval was the result of a partnership with ElevenLabs.