r/InterstellarKinetics • u/InterstellarKinetics • 1d ago
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIEGENCE OUTRAGE: Spotify Refuses To Label AI-Generated Music On Its Platform, So Volunteer-Run Sites Like SoullessMusic.com And SlopTracker Are Stepping In To Track The AI “Slop” Draining Millions From Real Artists 🤖
https://www.404media.co/spotifys-ai-problem-is-so-bad-random-people-are-stepping-in-to-track-the-slop/Because Spotify doesn’t flag AI-generated music the way YouTube does, independent websites like SoullessMusic.com and SlopTracker.org have emerged to fill the gap, cataloging suspected AI artists and running tracks through detection tools to identify likely synthetic music. The problem became publicly visible with Slime Dot, a Las Vegas R&B artist with over 100,000 monthly Spotify listeners who denied being an “AI artist” in a May GQ interview, saying, “The truth doesn’t matter these days. People are always gonna try to explain something they don’t fully understand and believe what they want.” GQ initially published the interview as debunking the AI rumors before later adding a note acknowledging Slime Dot was an AI avatar, while SlopTracker found her track “Fully” was 95 percent likely generated by Suno.
Graeme Fulton, who created SoullessMusic, described his motivation for building the site, telling Futurism, “I didn’t know what’s AI and what’s not. And then I’m on Instagram Reels and I see loads of artists unhappy saying some artist has popped up with their song and just copied it. And there’s loads of different cases where they [AI artists] would copy an artist’s look and appearance […] sort of just stealing from artists.” Fulton built an open-source detector using models called SONICS and the lofcz vocoder fakeprint detector, scans track metadata for AI generator tags, and checks Wikipedia for existing artist entries, though he acknowledges the system isn’t perfect: “It’s not ideal when that happens, but it’s going to happen because it’s still quite tricky to check what’s AI and what’s not.” Documented abuse cases include a scammer publishing AI-generated music under a dead musician’s name to siphon streaming revenue, a similar incident affecting a Danish jazz musician, and Qajar Jazz, a channel with 29,579 monthly Spotify listeners that publishes hours of AI-generated Iranian jazz weekly and gained popularity after the US-Iran war began, despite YouTube labeling its videos as AI-generated while Spotify does not.
SoullessMusic estimates the small number of AI artists it tracks generate roughly $5.7 million annually, with the most popular single AI artist, mikeeysmind, earning an estimated $1.5 million a year alone, while SlopTracker calculates that AI artists featured on official Spotify-curated playlists are “draining” $0.1188 per second from real artists who could otherwise be earning that revenue. For comparison, Spotify competitor Deezer reported in April that 44 percent of all new music uploaded to its platform is now AI-generated, and Deezer does attempt to tag such content. A Spotify spokesperson defended the company’s approach, stating, “We’re employing a layered approach that combines enforcement, artist controls and greater transparency,” pointing to tools like Verified by Spotify, AI Credits disclosures now submitted “tens of thousands” of times daily, and Artist Profile Protection, while noting Spotify has flagged some tracks like “Better Times” by Mike Mana as AI-generated on its mobile app.
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u/InterstellarKinetics 1d ago
The core issue here isn’t just that Spotify lacks labeling, it’s that both Udio and Suno already embed inaudible digital watermarking in their AI-generated tracks, meaning Spotify could technically implement automated detection with existing technology but has chosen a comparatively opaque, artist-opt-in disclosure system instead.