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Music streaming giant Spotify has announced that from September it will begin adding an “AI Persona” badge to some artist profiles, helping listeners identify when an artist’s music may have been generated using artificial intelligence.
AI Personas will also be excluded from Spotify’s editorial and algorithmic recommendations, in an effort to give greater visibility to music made by genuine human musicians and artists.
Spotify will give artists the option to disclose whether they consider themselves an AI Persona. The platform will also conduct its own reviews to identify profiles that appear to be AI-generated identities.
Listeners will also be able to report artists they believe should be reviewed by Spotify’s team.
“Although there’s a broad spectrum in how artists use AI as a creative tool, the question of whether a profile represents an actual human is one where Spotify can help make a clear determination,” reads a press release from Spotify.
It adds: “This badge is about the artist’s public identity, not about how the music was made.”
Growing concerns over AI music
The move comes at a time of growing concern across the music industry over the volume of AI-generated musical slop flooding streaming platforms.
In June, French music streaming service Deezer reported that uploads of AI-generated tracks had, for the first time, exceeded half of all daily new music deliveries.
Following the milestone, the platform said it would remove generative-AI tracks being used to generate fraudulent streams, as well as tracks that had not been streamed for six months or more.
Spotify has faced a similar problem. Last year, the platform revealed that it had removed 75 million spam tracks over a 12-month period, as AI tools contributed to a flood of low-quality and fraudulent music.
The alarming success of AI-generated music
The Velvet Sundown provided an early glimpse of how easily AI-generated artists can break through into the mainstream. The psychedelic rock project appeared on Spotify in 2025 and quickly amassed more than a million monthly listeners, releasing two albums in June.
Its supposed four members – complete with names (led by vocalist and “mellotron sorcerer” Gabe Farrow), photographs and elaborate biographies – appeared to present the band as a genuine four-piece from the US.
But doubts soon emerged. Reddit users started questioning the band’s authenticity after their music began appearing in listeners’ Spotify Discover Weekly playlists, while the group’s imagery and promotional material appeared clearly artificial.
The band’s own social media accounts initially denied the allegations, insisting that the music had been created by “real” people using “real instruments, real minds, and real soul”.
Eventually, The Velvet Sundown’s Spotify profile was updated to acknowledge the truth. The band described itself as a “synthetic music project guided by human creative direction”, with its music, voices, lyrics and imagery created with the assistance of AI.
The group still has more than 100,000 monthly listeners and several of their tracks have over one millions streams.
The phenomenon has also begun to spill into more traditional measures of musical success with the AI-generated country project Breaking Rust reaching No 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart with “Walk My Walk”.
The viral track now has close to 30 million streams on Spotify.