Spotify says it has excluded more than 50 million tracks from its recommendations

Spotify says it has removed more than 50 million tracks considered low-quality AI-generated content or spam from its recommendations over the past year. The announcement, reported on October 20 by The Verge, concerns the visibility of tracks in recommendations. It does not mean that all of these tracks have been removed from the catalog.

The platform also says it has changed its system to give greater prominence to music by human artists. It has introduced an AI Persona badge for artists who use an artificial identity without representing a real person, and says it does not recommend their music. This measure does not require all tracks produced with AI to be labeled.

To identify the content concerned, Spotify says it combines listener engagement and feedback, upload patterns, metadata and third-party AI detection tools. The announcement therefore describes filtering based on several signals, without establishing their respective accuracy or the number of possible errors.

The issue concerns distribution as much as music creation: remaining available and receiving a recommendation are becoming distinct situations. Spotify says it has observed a decline in listener concerns since these changes. However, the document provides no independent measurement by which to assess this result.