A year ago, we laid out our plans to protect artists and listeners from spam, impersonation, and deception in the age of AI. One core idea drives this work: human artistry comes first.

Here’s what we’ve done, and what’s next.

AI-generated slop and spam don’t belong in your recommendations, and we’ve made changes to keep them out and protect the listening experience. This year alone, we’ve taken more than 50 million slop and spam tracks out of recommendations. This is in addition to more than 75 million spammy tracks we’ve removed from our platform altogether for serious or repeated violations of our rules.

Earlier this year, we looked closely at the tracks listeners were skipping, ignoring, or telling us they didn’t want to hear. A clear pattern emerged: these tracks were consistently ones identified as slop or spam.

Over the past six months, we’ve made numerous updates to our recommendation system to remove slop and spam, and surface more music made by authentic, human artists. Our editors hold the same standard and don’t program content identified as slop or spam.

Since we made these changes, we’ve seen a marked decrease in listener concerns about this content showing up in recommendations.

No single signal catches slop or spam on its own, so we combine many: listener engagement and feedback, upload patterns, metadata, and information from multiple third-party AI detection tools. AI detection technology in particular has limitations, and it will only get harder as generative AI evolves.

Using these signals together, we can identify likely slop or spam with more confidence. We also hunt for new tactics, including mass uploads, duplicates, SEO manipulation, spammy playlist networks, and artificially short tracks.

As spammers change tactics, we’ll keep updating our systems.

This work isn’t finished. AI moves fast, and bad actors adapt just as fast. But as AI makes music more abundant, we believe listeners will value human artistry even more. Our job is to make Spotify the place they find it.

Learn more about what we’re doing to keep Spotify a trusted place for artists and listeners on our new Spotify for Artists page .

Keeping AI-generated slop and spam out of recommendations

This builds on the tools we’ve launched over the past year to protect artists and give listeners more context and trust in what they hear: