Spotify Says It Has Kept 50 Million “Slop and Spam” Tracks Out of Recommendations This Year

Spotify’s slop problem was easy to spot: it was the stuff listeners kept skipping. The company says it studied the tracks people were skipping, ignoring or telling it they didn’t want to hear, found a pattern, and has now kept more than 50 million “slop and spam” tracks out of recommendations this year. Billboard reports that those tracks are in addition to the more than 75 million Spotify has removed from the service outright.

The numbers come from a post Spotify published Tuesday (Oct. 20) titled “One Year In: Putting Human Artistry First on Spotify.” It says no single signal catches the junk, so the company combines listener feedback, upload patterns, metadata and several third-party AI detectors, while hunting for mass uploads, duplicates, SEO manipulation, spammy playlist networks and artificially short tracks. The post doesn’t split the 50 million between AI-generated tracks and ordinary spam, and it concedes that AI detection “has limitations” and will only get harder as generative AI evolves. The 75 million figure isn’t new: Spotify first gave it in September 2025, Digital Music News points out.

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The company’s statement was blunt:

AI-generated slop and spam don’t belong in your recommendations

Spotify, in a statement on Oct. 20, NBC News

For working musicians, the stakes are payout math. NBC News quotes Morgan Hayduk, CEO of the fraud-detection firm Beatdapp, saying that when AI slop inflates the total number of streams, every legitimate artist’s share of the pool shrinks. Spotify says its 1,000-stream royalty threshold, in place since 2024, is a first line of defense: tracks that look likely to be AI-generated are 10 times more likely to fall below it.

The rest of the update is a tally of artist-facing tools. More than 300,000 artists, over 70% of them independent, are now Verified by Spotify, and Spotify says they account for more than 99% of what listeners search for. Artists file tens of thousands of AI Credits a day to disclose where AI touched a song, thousands of AI Persona profiles now carry a label and are left out of recommendations by default, and Artist Profile Protection, a beta that lets artists review releases before they reach their pages, opens to every artist by the end of the year.

Spotify is also building an AI remix and cover tool, and Believe joined UMG, Merlin and Kobalt as a licensor on Tuesday, Billboard says. Digital Music News reads the crackdown as partly self-interest, noting that listeners who tire of slop could drift to Deezer, which tags AI audio, or Tidal, which stopped monetizing fully AI tracks over the summer.

We’ve been tracking the other side of this all month: the burner-account boom, bot streams and fake fan pages and Olivia Rodrigo’s “hard line” on AI. Spotify’s own closing line is that bad actors adapt as fast as AI moves, so expect more updates to follow.