The more appropriate question is why they published a AI artist at all. I think Spotify (or its owners/investors) might actually benefit from recommending AI-generated music by not having to pay real artists.
Like Spotify owns distribution, their largest investor Tencent Music Entertainment Group publishes AI-generated music = almost infinite profit.
From news: Tencent Music demonstrated strong revenue (1) growth in Q4 2025, with total revenues increasing by 16% year-over-year.
CEO of Tencent Music stated, "Our robust revenue growth and expansion in non-subscription services highlight our strategic focus on diversifying revenue streams. However, we acknowledge the need to address earnings challenges to meet investor expectations."
> The more appropriate question is why they published a AI artist at all.
Because they allow anyone to upload to Spotify. There's nothing stopping me, you, or anyone from generating AI tracks with Suno & friends, downloading them, and using a service like LANDR or Amuse to distribute them to Spotify, all for free.
> Like Spotify owns distribution, their largest investor Tencent Music Entertainment Group publishes AI-generated music = almost infinite profit.
This assumes that real people are listening to AI-generated music which does not seem to be the case. According to Deezer, 85% of streams on AI-generated music are fraudulent.[0] It's largely a vanity ouroboros where someone with more money than sense generates a song, pays bots to get fraudulent streams, and uses those streams to generate vanity metrics. Consumers are by and large not listening to AI generated music.
hn consumers by and large weren’t upvoting AI-written technology articles 12 months ago. The models got better, and now multiple such articles appear on the front page daily—with glowing comments.
Humanity’s aesthetics are not (apparently) all that sophisticated on average.
HN is the most concentrated accelerationist audience in the whole world and its very particular type of crowd. I don't think this translates at all to general public (well, maybe I would agree with you that the aesthetic sense of people on here is really less sophisticated than average).
It’s also hard to develop taste in an environment flooded with content. I am not sure how much of that is AI writing getting better, and how much of that is just a lack of taste from the newest members
Not the person you're replying to, but here's one that was at the top of the homepage this morning (and that I immediately clicked out of because it had that AI stink). I would bet my next paycheck that this was heavily edited by an LLM, if not outright written by one.
OK, but to qualify it also needs glowing comments about the writing, not just interaction with the concept (or title) of the article. Only one person did that ...
Exactly backwards: These articles suck because the writing sucks. There was this morning a well-written, engaging article about building a Gameboy emulator in F# that the author admitted using some LLM help to compose. Easy upvote.
It’s not impossible to get these tools to make your writing better, and presumably that will become easier over time. But if you don’t put in the effort & your own clear ideas, the result today is garbage. But pleasing garbage to a wide swath of the hn audience. Pop tech writing!
That's a long-term challenge for the next CEO to figure out.
Unlike CTC or CTC, radio and streaming ad campaigns are notoriously hard to track and attribute, and hence trend to brand-awareness. Advertisers won't see the effect of rising fraudulent streams immediately.
Don't stop Facebook from completely making up video numbers. Seems like it's a good way to rug pull a bunch of workers and force them to accept lower rates.
I think it can sort of make sense for some people who sort of listen to music as a background noise. But for me, when I am listening to a new song, I get curious about who the artist(s) is/are. Do they sound better in a live performance? What other music or artists inspired them? What other artists sound like them?
I don’t think it would be easy for a “AI” artist to not be suspicious to me unless they were like some kind of character that is made up by a record label or another artist.
I'm the opposite (I know, it's probably bad) but I often do everything I can to not know who's behind because I often try to dream and make my own mind about a specific song/artist, and of course my wife then suddenly show me who the person is and then the whole perception of the artist changes and sometimes ruin it for me.
I listen to music from night to morning (practically non-stop actually) and probably 100+ different artists within a day, I'm not genuinely interested in them, I'm just interested in their work.
> I think it can sort of make sense for some people who sort of listen to music as a background noise
This is a whole genre of music in of itself that real people created which AIs were trained on stolen copies of to produce slop that doesn’t have to compensate the origins.
So it only makes sense in that case if you think slop derived from real art is awesome and that actual human beings can get fucked.
> It's largely a vanity ouroboros where someone with more money than sense generates a song, pays bots to get fraudulent streams, and uses those streams to generate vanity metrics.
It's actually money laundering. I generate ai music and then pay hackers illicit money to listen thousands of times and then I get clean money from Spotify.
6 tracks have made the Billboard charts. That's a pretty definitive signal that people are listening to AI music.
Where to draw the line on what is/isn't AI is a rabbit hole in and of itself. You'd have a hard time convincing me that people aren't using AI to build the most powerful DSP plugins. I've been very pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to make very music-useful tools with Faust and Codex.
You'll notice in the article they mention that these AI artists got into the charts thanks to 1,000 downloads sold. 1,000 is a comically easy number to game; that's US$1,000, tops, and far less if you pay for false downloads from SEA and such where prices are lower.
As a concrete example of how gamed these are, look at one of the examples from the article, Enlly Blue[0]. The video for the song mentioned in the article, Through My Soul, has 10 million views. All four of her (its?) most recent videos over the past 1 month: 2.2k views, 3.3k views, 2.1k views, 2.1k views. The views stop coming when the creator stops spending.
One of the problems is that it's hard to tell at first that it's AI music. Probably still hard to figure it out by ear after you've been told. But I think not nearly as many people would choose to listen to AI songs if they knew they were AI.
There's a reason it can succeed as it is now. Making music that is catchy to our ears is fairly formulaic. It's easy fot AI to do the same. But if they start labeling which music is AI and which isn't, it probably won't succeed as well.
I was pretty pissed and considered canceling my Spotify Premium after the first time I'd realized I'd been duped by AI songs. I just report them any time I see them now. If they gave me a settings option to block all AI music I'd be fine.
I'm put in mind of the Merchandise Marks Act 1887
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Germany#History - which ultimately did the opposite of what it was expected to do. There is a real chance here that people just want to listen to something that sounds nice and aren't that fussed about whether a human is involved.
Besides, people seem to go in pretty strongly with computers to tune the sound already. It wouldn't be that shocking if people were already listening to works that can only be made with the aid of a computer.
why does it matter to you if it's AI or not? if you enjoy a song you shouldn't resent it just because it's AI generated. Me personally there's many AI songs that I like and enjoy listening to.
Because I care about art being a human endeavor. AI doesn't create art, it regurgitates an unidentifiable goop churned together in its stomach by all the crap its eaten. There is no thought. There is no feeling. There is no meaning. If you only care about the sound, that's cool, enjoy it, but I don't.
> Consumers are by and large not listening to AI generated music
Consumers are sadly too ignorant to tell. YouTube is brimming with AI music slop and people praising it in the comments because they are unable to tell the difference (and it is actually pretty easy once you know what to look out for)
It takes away from real human artists who do their part to slowly advance human culture. Music will not develop without human artists. Maybe for this moment in time AI can fulfill some people's musical desires, but it's not going to keep up with the times.
The point of art, in a general sense, is humanity. Automating away your artistic needs is like automating away your social needs. It's a one way "relationship" that is superficial and self-indulgent. It's a step towards an empty world.
Why would music not develop without human artists? This isn't true at all, "AI" isn't necessary LLM as well, there is plenty of ways for AI to innovate, and let's be real, most musics from humans are a bit of copy-cat nowadays, ton of AI music actually made me vibe personally and stuff I haven't heard before.
Have you tried a day of listening solely to AI music? I feel you might change your mind, sure sometimes there is some serious off-tune (feels like an hallucination from the model) but we know this is temporary.
PS: I'm conscious of what it does to humanity, but there is also facts that AI does produce great songs, that's 2 different discussions.
You hear a song with vocals that strongly emotionally resonate with you, reminding you of your mother who passed away recently after a long terrible illness. You want to know more about the singer that almost brought you to tears, only to find there is none and that the song was AI generated.
But if you did the exercise 10 years ago you'd find the lyrics were originally about the songwriter's daughter and the band tweaked it to be able the the band manager's hypochondriac ex boyfriend.
Then they hired a session singer to sing it and mixed in several takes and then adjusted the sound with various tools to produce just the right sound. Plus the Chorus was actually from some country song from 1972 that had been completely changed
and the actual "band" is actually just two guys who hire session players to do most of the music while they handle the keyboard and mixing
So it does something good for you, then you decide to put a label on it due to how it was made. You are letting your mind overwrite a genuine response you had based on an opinion that "it should not feel good because it's AI made". As I said in another comment - intelectualization.
Which puts the label "AI made" on it and that changes the listener's perspective. In the example given, the listener had a strong emotional reaction to the sound, but after they put the "AI made" label on it, they suddenly convince themselves to not have that emotional response anymore.
No, that's not the causality. They put the AI label on it and they change their perspective, but the bulk of the perspective change is not specifically because AI, it's because the specific person they felt a connection to doesn't exist. You could get a similar reaction with an extremely impersonal but non-AI method of making a song.
I'm not the one complaining. I have no emotion in this. What conflict do you think I have internally?
You're criticizing an overly simplified version of the actual argument, and I'm trying to help you understand the actual argument.
You could criticize their actual argument. I think there could be a healthy debate there. Their argument, about being disappointed there is no actual author you could have a meeting of the minds with, is something that matters different amounts to different people. Even if you still dislike that argument, it's something you can't dismiss as a mere prejudice that got intellectualized.
> Even if you still dislike that argument, it's something you can't dismiss as a mere prejudice that got intellectualized.
Why can't I?
I think that it's a great example of trying to explain a preference with an idea. Preferences don't need to be explained. Quite often they can't be. I think it strange, that a person would like something, then dislike it because some meta-information about the thing is not preferred. I know people do it all the time. "I like service X, but I don't like the guy who built it" is a great example of that. What we are discussing here is an even better example, because music appeals to the sense of aesthetics more directly and has little to no utility beyond that. If you find a piece that does appeal to your sense of aesthetics, why would you convince yourself to not like it? Sounds like a job for the mind. Discussing which trick of the mind does the job better, seems to be missing the point. That's why I dismiss it.
"I want to have a meeting of the minds" is a valid preference all by itself that involves no prejudice.
> Preferences don't need to be explained.
I don't understand how you start a paragraph with this, and then spend the rest of it taking about how you dismiss people's author-based preferences.
You're allowed to have preferences based on the work itself and the author. Death of the author is not a fundamental truth of the universe. And having those preferences, caring about the author, is not convincing yourself of anything, is not any kind of self-deception.
Realistically speaking, why is that a problem? What is the point of money if not enjoyment? If these people enjoy it, what's wrong with it?
Mark finds $100,000 (something good for Mark), then finds out it's the inheritance of a family who's about to get kicked out of their house (label due to how it was made). Mark decides he should not keep the money because it belongs to the family (intellectualizing).
You're saying Mark should have kept the money because doing otherwise is intellectualizing.
It's like the MBS during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Today it prints money, tomorrow it blows up in your face.
Yeah they put a blue check on it like Elon did. Until they get paid to put the check on slop. Rotten fish is still rotten even if you mix it with fresh fish and label it accordingly.
> Lie. You will not. You need to go through the distributor (1), and it has always been this way.
Er yes, which is why I mentioned LANDR and Amuse, both of which are on the page you linked. I mentioned those two specifically because I know they don't charge up-front and instead take a % of royalties, so they're ideal for flooding Spotify with AI slop. I'm not sure which part you think is a lie.
> You need to go through a distributor (1) that does due diligence first, and it has always been this way.
I see you edited your comment. Distributors do not do any sort of "due diligence". For the free distributors, you don't even need to give them personal information until you try to actually cash out your earnings. For DistroKid, when I first signed up I put in my credit card info, submitted my first song and it was up on Spotify 3 days later.
> However, I wasn't aware that distributors might not vet content prior to publishing.
Oh it's far worse than that. Some of them like the abovementioned LANDR also offer "AI-assisted music production", so there's that!
Very few do proper vetting. They'll remove your music in a heartbeat if someone reports you to them (even in cases where such a report is completely bogus), but they won't do much to vet you beforehand. If they did that, they'd be labels, not distributors. Their only job is to be the hoop you have to get through that you don't have on say SoundCloud or YouTube.
i recall reading an article in the guardian or some other newspaper about some basically unknown companies that contract musicians to create stock background music for television. what was interesting is that they now create hyper-specialized music and ambience, which is then picked up by spotify for curated playlists. they create basically filler content, and for some reason these genre/mood playlists generate enough revenue from casual listeners so it is a worthwhile niche, and i guess that ai-generated music is the natural progression from that.
edit: it might've been this wikipedia page and some swedish newspaper i had read. i specifically remember Epidemic Sound, as the swedish state television sometimes uses them for stock sound.
People are not seeking out the AI music, it’s coming up in algorithmic playlists and hoping people don’t notice. If you search for any popular artist you’ll find covers that are almost all ai. There’s also generic playlists especially hoping someone asks Siri to play xyz.
Podcasts, audiobooks, AI music, and now an entire fitness hub - they really don't want to pay actual artists anything for their music while jacking up prices for everyone else.
(Oh, and sitting back and crying "app fairness" for quite some time, but it's odd that they haven't been complaining about Apple in a hot minute in the DSA fight yet still won't ship long overdue support like AirPlay 2...)
> And yet somehow TIDAL is able to between three and four times the royalties per stream that Spotify does.
Looks like they do allocation differently between popular and indie artists, but the overall share, as percentage of revenue, is similar from what I've found searching online. The major record labels pressing for an allocation algorithm that favors them is kinda obvious.
This means that for an indie artist TIDAL is probably better - but not because Spotify itself is paying less, but because TIDAL was able to avoid being pressed into paying larger share to the record labels.
We get these numbers thrown online without saying if it's comparing direct artist payout, which plans are counted (Spotify has free plans, and free users are still counted in streams), is the artist indie, niche with record contract or very popular with record contract.
I don't listen to podcasts in general, wouldn't listen to Rogan even if I did listen to podcasts, and I buy (rent, tbh) my audiobooks from another evil company.
But even if they spent all that money on artists, the payouts would rise by 0.75% (percent of current, not cents): $11B artist payouts in 2025, $250M Rogan multi-year contract, assuming 3 years: 100 x (0.25 ÷ 3) ÷ 11 = 0.75%
Also, it doesn't make sense to compare a niche indie music artist with the most popular podcaster in the world. You should compare mega-stars with mega-stars.
I gave up on Spotify when they did their push into podcasts and audiobooks. It became clear that they weren't really interested in serving their core customer base of people who just want to listen to music.
> I think Spotify (or its owners/investors) might actually benefit from recommending AI-generated music by not having to pay real artists.
You can remove the think and might; there were articles years ago saying Spotify actually commissioned artists to produce fairly generic songs for the highly played but passively listened to "background noise" playlists, so that Spotify would get the revenue / not pay real artists. I wouldn't be surprised if they replaced those commissioned productions with AI generated stuff to try and cut costs.
I would love to be able to filter out AI-generated music entirely. I stopped using Spotify's Discovery function as I can't bear this glitchy, really bad slop. It's like those "bad kitty" animations, but in music form. It's really insulting, both for the audience and artists, that they are promoting such lousy content. I hope that Spotify won't take the route of enshittification, quite literally.
The thing about Spotify is that is NOT driven by record labels, it is an platform for the individual meaning an individual can upload their music in an laissez-faire situation.
If they disallow AI artists tomorrow, they are going against what they created the company for.
Like Spotify owns distribution, their largest investor Tencent Music Entertainment Group publishes AI-generated music = almost infinite profit.
From news: Tencent Music demonstrated strong revenue (1) growth in Q4 2025, with total revenues increasing by 16% year-over-year.
CEO of Tencent Music stated, "Our robust revenue growth and expansion in non-subscription services highlight our strategic focus on diversifying revenue streams. However, we acknowledge the need to address earnings challenges to meet investor expectations."
1. https://www.investing.com/news/transcripts/earnings-call-tra...