Spotify announces policy overhaul to address AI deepfakes and music spam
The streaming giant announced a three-pronged strategy focusing on impersonation, platform manipulation, and transparency, cementing its stance that the choice to use or license a voice for AI purposes must remain entirely with the artist.
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Spotify is rolling out a major overhaul of its content policies and platform technology, directly addressing the surge in AI-generated voice clones and low-quality, high-volume spam that threatens to erode artist protections and dilute royalty payments.
The streaming giant announced a three-pronged strategy focusing on impersonation, platform manipulation, and transparency, cementing its stance that the choice to use or license a voice for AI purposes must remain entirely with the artist.
Spotify has introduced a strict new impersonation policy targeting vocal deepfakes. The policy mandates that vocal impersonation is only permitted in music when the impersonated artist has authorized the usage. This measure provides artists with stronger protections and a clearer path to seek removal of unauthorized clones that exploit their identity.
The company is also ramping up its efforts to fight fraudulent music delivery, a tactic where bad actors—using AI or not—upload music to another artist's official profile. Spotify is investing in new prevention tools alongside leading distributors and is committing more resources to its "content mismatch process" to drastically reduce review times and allow artists to report issues even during the pre-release stage.
Acknowledging that the platform's exponential growth—with total music payouts reaching $10 billion—has attracted bad actors, Spotify is implementing a technical solution to combat "slop" and manipulative uploads.
This fall, the platform will roll out a new music spam filter. This system is designed to identify uploaders and tracks engaging in spam tactics, which include mass uploads, duplicates, SEO hacks, and artificially short tracks, all made easier by generative AI. Once identified, these tracks will be tagged and removed from the recommendation algorithm, preventing them from generating royalties that would otherwise be distributed to legitimate artists and songwriters. Spotify will implement the filter conservatively to avoid penalizing authentic creators.
In a move toward greater listener transparency, Spotify confirmed it will support a new industry standard for AI disclosures in music credits, developed in partnership with DDEX (Digital Data Exchange) and a wide array of industry partners.
This standard moves beyond a simple "is AI" or "is not AI" label. It will allow artists and rightsholders to nuance their disclosure, specifying exactly where AI played a role in a track’s creation—whether for vocals, instrumentation, or post-production. As this metadata is submitted, it will be displayed across the app. Spotify emphasized that this is a transparency measure to build trust and is not intended to penalize or down-rank artists who responsibly use AI tools in their creative process.
