AI music appears in recaps

AI-made songs are now showing up often enough on streaming services that music-industry recaps spent the weekend treating them as a live business issue, not a novelty. (musicbusinessworldwide.com) Spotify has moved from quiet moderation to explicit policy. In September 2025, the company said it would fight impersonation, spam and deception tied to generative artificial intelligence, and Billboard reported Spotify had removed more than 75 million “spammy” tracks over the prior year. (newsroom.spotify.com) (billboard.com) Spotify is also talking publicly about artificial intelligence as a product category. On the company’s February 10, 2026 earnings call, co-president and chief product officer Gustav Söderström said Spotify sees a difference between new music made with artificial intelligence tools and “derivative” works such as remixes or covers made from existing songs. (musicbusinessworldwide.com) (billboard.com) The immediate pressure is volume. Deezer said on January 29, 2026 that it was receiving more than 60,000 fully artificial-intelligence-generated tracks a day, or about 39% of all music delivered to the service daily. (musicbusinessworldwide.com) Deezer has responded by tagging detected artificial-intelligence tracks and excluding some of them from algorithmic recommendations, while keeping them available on the platform. The company says royalties are unchanged for those uploads. (creatorsupport.deezer.com) (billboard.com) Spotify’s problem has not just been volume but attribution. TechCrunch reported on March 24, 2026 that Spotify was testing a tool to stop artificial-intelligence “slop” from being attached to real artists’ pages after Sony Music said it had sought the removal of more than 135,000 artificial-intelligence songs impersonating its artists across streaming services. (techcrunch.com) That has already hit recognizable names. Billboard Canada reported in January 2026 that seemingly artificial-intelligence-generated songs briefly appeared on Anne Murray’s Spotify profile before being removed. (ca.billboard.com) Spotify has tried to draw a line between allowed tool use and banned deception. Its September 2025 policy update said unauthorized voice clones and other impersonations are not allowed, while the company also backed labeling standards for artificial-intelligence music metadata. (newsroom.spotify.com) (techcrunch.com) The split inside the business is now clearer: platforms want to block fake artists and spam, while also building licensed artificial-intelligence tools for remixing, covers and fan participation. That is why artificial-intelligence music keeps landing in industry recaps: it is now a moderation problem, a licensing fight and a product strategy at the same time. (musicbusinessworldwide.com) (newsroom.spotify.com)