Does Linkin Park get a badge? Has anyone ever proven that Linkin Park is human? All their songs sound suspiciously the same…
What about Nickelback?
They should have used a 💩 for the AI artists instead.
They should just not allow AI “artists” at all.
Pfff, too late spotify. I’ve already switched to one of your competitors. Allowing AI “artists” at all is unacceptable. No sale.
Which competitor doesn’t allow them?
Bandcamp
https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/
And unlike streaming sites, you own what you buy, and the artist gets paid much better; you’d have to stream the same song 200+ times with a premium Spotify account to generate the same profit for the artist as just buying the song outright on Bandcamp.
Yeah, but Bandcamp isn’t an alternative to Spotify.
It’s an alternative to streaming.
Sounds like it’s still an alternative!
I’m using Qobuz. Seems alright so far, unless someone knows something I don’t (totally possible lol)
I’ve been using Qobuz for a few months and it’s pretty good. They had a rough bug a couple of weeks ago where some songs would stop playing and skip to the next one, but it seems to be resolved.
If you go into settings, you can hook it to last.fm and get lots of cool listening stats.
Qobuz still had a lot of music slop 2 months ago. They promised to clean that up but I’m not sure if they really did it.
I haven’t really encountered it, but I generally stick to my daily/weekly Q and saved playlists. At least they’re aiming to clean it up. Spotify is adding a “verified” flag on non-slop.
Qobuz is probably the one streaming service I would pay for if they sorted out the huge gaps in their available library.
I get this when trying to setup an account on that site?
¯_(ツ)_/¯
not exactly a competitor since it’s a music marketplace, not a streaming service, but bandcamp does not allow ai-generated music
Qobuz is BOTH a music store and a streaming service.
How was the switching process?
I’ve a family account that’s fully utilised so if I move I have to drag everyone with me.
Yeah, nice try. I still block Spotify on all my devices.
Absolutely fucked up and they have no clue.
Bahahahahaha… Man. They still don’t get it.
They’ve been using it as an infinite money glitch for awhile now. Make AI slop music and make a bunch of bots listen to it for the ad revenue. Nobody makes the music, nobody listens to the music, nobody listens to the ads, but Spotify gets paid. They’ll never crack down on this unless they themselves have to stop. Until than, they’ll just “assume” everything is made by people and play dumb when questioned.
Which is what I find crazy. That money comes from advertising which is not endless. How are the advertisers able to show any semblance of ROI when nothing is passing through? Obviously Spotify doesn’t care if the proles voice their discontent. But how are they able to keep the advertisers from getting fed up with no returns?
I think that it is less about the ad revenue and more about decreasing the total proportion of streams that they have to pay royalties for. Spotify pays people to churn out AI music that they own, and they place that music on their popular playlists (to increase plus from actual listeners) and also have bot armies streaming it endlessly. Since royalties are not a fixed per-play fee, but rather a calculation based on the total amount of subscriber money divided by the total number of plays, massively increasing the total play count with music that does not require royalty payments means they pay out a lower proportion of what they take in each month.
I think in business attribution is really difficult. Like figuring out why a click/purchase happened. It might be that these systems are so opaque and difficult to penetrate that nobody notices when hundreds of millions are missing. Or maybe the actual situation is a little different, like maybe real people do listen to AI music. I’ve heard a bit about that anyway. Though I’ve also heard about organized criminals combining affiliated artists and bot listens to launder money.
For the people asking “but who will buy ther products/services after they replace us with AI?’, this is the answer. It hasn’t mattered for a while now
deleted by creator
This can’t possibly be profitable for the scammers.
Just like the “verified” badge on Twitter eh?
Fuck Spotify. I’ll buy albums (drm free, mostly from Bandcamp), pirate, or go without.
Today is bandcamp Friday, too. Bandcamp passes their cut on to the band.
And how long until they start accepting money from people to Verify their AI created garbage?
I assumed that was already the case here.
Well okay then…and fuck Spotify anyway.
The pirate life is the only way to be. Take to the seas mateys!!
🏴☠️🏴☠️ Yarr!! 🏴☠️🏴☠️
How are they “verifying” that it’s a flesh and blood human, and that the human doesn’t rely on AI? No digital method would work. You’d need to visit in person and have at least one other human witness them singing or playing without internet access.
I only care about this if they also have the functionality to block them from being recommended in any algorithms, or better yet prevent anyone from listening to it at all
or better yet prevent anyone from listening to it at all
So you’re advocating for top down control when it comes to consumption of online media rather than letting people choose for themselves?
Avoiding ai content isn’t exactly a choice I can make currently. On virtually every streaming app, if I use any kind of recommendation or auto play function, ai comes up. Because AI music creators tend to release literally thousands of songs vs human creators who release a handful, even if the algorithms are randomized between available options, it skews heavily towards ai content.
So, yes, I want the owners of those platforms to remove the AI content altogether rather than just put a small icon in the corner of the song name or whatever.
Letting users choose for themselves isn’t exactly what is happening. Forced feeding of garbage would be more accurate.
Giving users the option to hide AI content if they don’t want to see it would be the sensible way to go. However, you advocating for something to be disabled for everyone just because you don’t like it is forcibly pushing your ideology to others.
I would be totally fine with that. I suppose you are right and that’s a fair call out. I think I just don’t personally know anyone who would volunteer to receive AI content on their algorithms if they had a choice.
top down control
That ship has sailed the moment the user made a Spotify account
See, that’s how you make actual users buy the badges. Now to be considered not AI you have to put money up. Who wins? Spotify does. And they don’t even have to make verification all that thorough, just enough to say they tried to filter out the worst of the bots.
