alt.hn

5/1/2026 at 4:42:41 PM

Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI

 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yerr4m1yno

by reconnecting

5/1/2026 at 7:08:20 PM

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."

1. https://www.investing.com/news/transcripts/earnings-call-tra...

by reconnecting

5/1/2026 at 7:23:39 PM

> 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.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/20/deezer-says-44-of-songs-up...

by mjr00

5/1/2026 at 8:08:08 PM

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.

by twoodfin

5/3/2026 at 2:48:08 AM

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

by _kulang

5/1/2026 at 8:51:02 PM

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).

by andersonpico

5/1/2026 at 9:25:18 PM

My point is that most of these “vibe articles” are pretty bad. They’re muddled in their ideas and full of gaps in logic or fact.

But the aesthetics are tuned enough to get upvotes from this same audience that thinks AI music is going nowhere.

by twoodfin

5/2/2026 at 2:26:20 AM

[dead]

by nullsanity

5/1/2026 at 11:02:58 PM

Could you give some examples of such articles?

by ciupicri

5/1/2026 at 11:07:19 PM

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47973376

by cryzinger

5/2/2026 at 1:06:36 AM

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 ...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47973724

... then got contradicted and downvoted.

by card_zero

5/2/2026 at 2:01:24 AM

Fair, lol. I will admit I didn't read the comments :P

by cryzinger

5/1/2026 at 10:35:57 PM

[flagged]

by arcticfox

5/1/2026 at 11:29:29 PM

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!

by twoodfin

5/2/2026 at 1:13:21 AM

There are underexplored musical genres?

by card_zero

5/2/2026 at 7:24:12 AM

There's currently a serious lack of banjo and didgeridoo collaboration, aside from that one human band from Elcho Island.

Clearly the world needs Clankers to bridge the shortfall of six fingered circular mouth breathers /s

by defrost

5/1/2026 at 7:55:19 PM

> This assumes that real people are listening to AI-generated music which does not seem to be the case.

Spotify will still profit from fraudulent streams at the expense of advertisers.

by overfeed

5/1/2026 at 7:59:35 PM

Who will then stop advertising on there real quickly once they find out what's going on

by trelbutate

5/1/2026 at 8:28:51 PM

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.

by overfeed

5/2/2026 at 1:48:04 AM

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.

by shimman

5/2/2026 at 4:23:14 AM

I basically only listen to AI music now...

https://www.youtube.com/@EndlessTaverns

by mathgladiator

5/2/2026 at 5:38:35 AM

You couldn’t waterboard this sort of confession out of me. Imagine proclaiming publicly that you have zero-taste and only consume AI slop

by hacker161

5/2/2026 at 5:35:29 PM

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.

by layman51

5/3/2026 at 2:58:15 PM

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.

by pixel_popping

5/3/2026 at 10:50:59 PM

> 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.

by hacker161

5/2/2026 at 1:30:07 AM

> 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.

by parineum

5/2/2026 at 8:38:34 AM

Spotify themselves generate AI music, they prefer that to paying artists.

by stuaxo

5/1/2026 at 8:47:02 PM

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.

https://www.billboard.com/lists/ai-artists-on-billboard-char...

by techno303

5/2/2026 at 1:14:11 AM

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.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@EnllyBlueOfficial/videos

by mjr00

5/1/2026 at 10:35:44 PM

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.

by xingped

5/2/2026 at 12:50:12 AM

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.

by roenxi

5/2/2026 at 1:52:07 AM

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.

by upmind

5/2/2026 at 2:34:51 AM

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.

by xingped

5/2/2026 at 10:26:54 AM

It is debatable what thoughts and feelings went into the music of Wesley Willis, of "Whip The Llama's Ass" fame, despite him being human.

by arcfour

5/2/2026 at 3:15:36 PM

rock over london rock on chicago! pontiac we build driving excitement

by scragz

5/2/2026 at 6:59:13 AM

When a human makes a I IV V it's art

When a machine does it, soulless

by hexasquid

5/1/2026 at 10:17:08 PM

How many tracks didn't make it to the Billboard charts?

by srveale

5/2/2026 at 3:27:07 AM

we're measuring if people are listening to AI music, not what percentage of AI music is slop

by vanjajaja1

5/1/2026 at 7:36:36 PM

> 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)

by uncircle

5/1/2026 at 7:53:30 PM

Realistically speaking, why is that a problem? What is the point of music if not enjoyment? If these people enjoy it, what's wrong with it?

by neonstatic

5/1/2026 at 8:34:25 PM

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.

by lifeformed

5/2/2026 at 3:01:50 PM

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.

by pixel_popping

5/1/2026 at 8:37:46 PM

That's the creator's perspective. From a listener's perspective, it's "do I enjoy it" or "do I not enjoy it". Everything else is intellectualization.

by neonstatic

5/2/2026 at 1:16:17 AM

But that means nothing. There's no raw "enjoy", except maybe drugs, and I have my doubts about that.

by card_zero

5/2/2026 at 6:27:16 AM

> There's no raw "enjoy"

What do you mean?

by neonstatic

5/1/2026 at 8:45:58 PM

Painters said the same thing about cameras

by Ferret7446

5/2/2026 at 3:00:27 PM

And turns out there is still room to enjoy both photography and paintings as their own art forms.

by Zopieux

5/1/2026 at 9:25:40 PM

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.

by RiverCrochet

5/2/2026 at 4:19:44 AM

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

by slyall

5/2/2026 at 1:33:55 AM

Behind every AI-generated song is a human who wanted you to listen to its message.

by userbinator

5/1/2026 at 10:01:36 PM

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.

by neonstatic

5/2/2026 at 4:50:13 AM

> you decide to put a label on it due to how it was made

That is not what they said. This reads like you're replying to a previous post and ignoring the actual explanation they gave.

by Dylan16807

5/2/2026 at 5:33:38 AM

It's my interpretation of "only to find there is none and that the song was AI generated" in this context

by neonstatic

5/2/2026 at 7:11:20 AM

The key words are "there is none". It's not the label, it's the lack of the person writing those lyrics.

by Dylan16807

5/2/2026 at 7:56:19 AM

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.

by neonstatic

5/2/2026 at 8:05:33 AM

> and that changes the listener's perspective

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.

by Dylan16807

5/3/2026 at 12:59:16 AM

> As I said in another comment - intellectualization.

I think you are proving my point

by neonstatic

5/3/2026 at 1:03:44 AM

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.

by Dylan16807

5/3/2026 at 10:52:03 PM

> 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.

by neonstatic

5/4/2026 at 6:30:28 AM

> Why can't I?

"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.

by Dylan16807

5/2/2026 at 1:20:06 AM

It does something good for you emotionally, via cognition. Further cognition ruins this. Never meet your heroes, sort of thing.

by card_zero

5/2/2026 at 6:46:54 PM

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.

by RiverCrochet

5/1/2026 at 7:50:28 PM

How can you trust that the commenters aren't AI too?

by Lammy

5/1/2026 at 7:50:51 PM

Could you elaborate? I can't tell with music and voice

by agmater

5/1/2026 at 9:13:11 PM

You won't tell from the music. It's obviously an AI generated mix when:

- the channel posts multiple mixes per week

- the thumbnail is clearly AI generated

- most importantly, the tracklist never includes any author, because there are none

If you search for "<genre> mix" on YouTube right now, 9/10 results fail these criteria.

by uncircle

5/1/2026 at 8:19:53 PM

Lo-fi channels used to show the artist and song names. These newer ones don't bother with credits, or have made up song titles.

E.g. "funky chicken jam"

by julianlam

5/1/2026 at 8:05:28 PM

If AI music sells like you proclaim, it would be bad for spotify to NOT ban it, since it is printing money.

by threepts

5/1/2026 at 8:47:40 PM

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.

by petre

5/2/2026 at 4:44:29 PM

LANDR and Amuse dropped their free options.

by Kye

5/1/2026 at 8:05:33 PM

[dead]

by Renevith

5/1/2026 at 7:26:35 PM

[flagged]

by reconnecting

5/1/2026 at 7:29:34 PM

> 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.

by mjr00

5/1/2026 at 7:33:32 PM

Apologies, I had correct my comment prior to your reply.

> Because they allow anyone to upload to Spotify.

No one is allowed to upload directly to Spotify. However, I wasn't aware that distributors might not vet content prior to publishing.

by reconnecting

5/1/2026 at 8:14:25 PM

> 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.

by input_sh

5/1/2026 at 8:55:47 PM

> Very few do proper vetting.

Sounds promising. You nearly convinced me to reinstall FruityLoops and finally set out on the artist's path.

by reconnecting

5/1/2026 at 8:08:46 PM

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_fake_artists_...

by knose

5/1/2026 at 8:04:33 PM

I would argue AI artists are antithetical to their business model, when people can generate their own versions of popular IP, they'll just use that.

by threepts

5/1/2026 at 8:36:57 PM

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.

by dawnerd

5/1/2026 at 8:14:54 PM

i agree they want to make more money but come on calling them "AI artist" ?

by emkoemko

5/1/2026 at 7:11:02 PM

That's every move Spotify has done recently.

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...)

by kotaKat

5/1/2026 at 8:19:23 PM

You're right on what they're doing, but not the why:

1. They're getting the short end of the deal with music licensing (as are artists, btw)

2. They can't pay the artists more: the vast majority of the money goes to labels

3. The only way Spotify can grow profits if it moves to content that's not under the iron grip of the labels: podcasts, audiobooks, etc.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47783435

by senko

5/1/2026 at 9:42:29 PM

You're forgetting:

4. Once Spotify wrests power from the labels, they start the enshitification process themselves.

by ShyCodeGardener

5/2/2026 at 6:22:59 AM

I'm old school - I tend not to blame people (or companies, for that matter) now for things they might do in the future.

by senko

5/2/2026 at 3:45:22 AM

And yet somehow TIDAL is able to between three and four times the royalties per stream that Spotify does.

Maybe Spotify could pay Joe Rogan a little less than a quarter billion dollars for a couple of years of podcasts.

by FireBeyond

5/2/2026 at 6:20:14 AM

> 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.

See: https://www.reddit.com/r/TIdaL/comments/1jxkoil/tidal_pays_a...

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.

Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Drake, The Weekend and Ariana Grande - neither of which I ever want to listen to on Spotify or anywhere else - got more money from Spotify than Rogan. (https://www.thestreet.com/entertainment/highest-paid-artists...)

by senko

5/1/2026 at 8:06:10 PM

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.

by the_snooze

5/1/2026 at 7:40:18 PM

There are some decent AI songs out there, I’ve met a few people who can’t tell and don’t care that they are listening to AI music.

If it sounds good, why not allow it?

by Dig1t

5/1/2026 at 8:07:32 PM

Purists have some agenda against AI that it's "soulless" and people shouldn't be allowed to enjoy that sort of music.

Remember when Radiohead launched in rainbows all digital and a LOT of people protested?

by threepts

5/1/2026 at 8:16:44 PM

wanting to support actual artists is being a "purist", why can't we just have opt in toggle to allow AI slop?

by emkoemko

5/1/2026 at 8:28:51 PM

You can support real human artists all you want, that is your choice. That is not purism.

Purism is saying, like a lot of intent in this thread, people who listen to AI music are dumb and tasteless.

by threepts

5/1/2026 at 8:25:49 PM

> 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.

by Cthulhu_

5/1/2026 at 8:03:44 PM

They are paying the people uploading the AI music. They don’t care if they pay a real singer or someone that created a song with AI.

by victorbjorklund

5/1/2026 at 7:30:24 PM

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.

by kmac_

5/2/2026 at 3:00:04 PM

I love AI music, why shouldn't I be able to access this whole new era with Spotify?

by pixel_popping

5/1/2026 at 8:37:41 PM

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.

by threepts

5/1/2026 at 8:33:07 PM

[flagged]

by chickensong

5/1/2026 at 8:41:17 PM

I might be in the minority, but I think this anti-AI sentiment is going to be generational. The next AI-native generation to grow up creating AI music, photos, videos, literature, code, etc will think it's silly why the older generation is so appalled at what they created and resistant to using AI to do it

I'm not placing a value judgement either way, but I do think there will be a divide in the ways things are done largely by generation. Both sides will have their arguments for why they do things the way they do it

by jameslk

5/1/2026 at 9:36:14 PM

It's not that simple, I think. Music, literature, even photos and software sometimes, are interesting for their context - someone made them, for you, and they wanted to tell you something. They're interesting because we care about the person on the other end. But if there is no person on the other end, why should I care?

We can argue about this if you want. Long chain of comments back and forth. But ask yourself, if we did that, and it turned out I'd actually not read anything you wrote, instead just turned the whole thing over to a chatbot to argue for me - would it make a difference to you? I think it would.

The text on the screen might well be indistinguishable from whether I did it myself. Just as AI generated music might be indistinguishable one day, if not already. But just as you probably wouldn't want to argue with me if I don't even bother to read what you wrote, why should you listen to my music if I didn't even care to listen to it myself?

by vintermann

5/1/2026 at 9:52:46 PM

AI writing, music, art is still extremely derivative. Unless that changes we will still need humans that provide the interesting aspects. If AI facilitates certain things the way that more powerful DAWs or raster graphics programs do then it's fundamentally no different

by lukajk

5/1/2026 at 11:50:08 PM

Natural beauty doesn't need a person on the other end to be appreciated, as one counterexample.

by cma

5/2/2026 at 12:43:13 AM

But if there is no person on the other end, why should I care?

There are countless people "on the other end" --- everyone who contributed training data, and of course the one who prompted the AI to generate the result. It's odd that this debate always ends up with one side thinking there's a machine autonomously generating music, when in fact AI-generated music comes from humans using AI to create what they want.

by userbinator

5/3/2026 at 9:40:49 AM

No, if you look at the actual AI generated music flooding the streaming services, it's pretty clear that they're not trying to create what they want in a musical sense. They probably don't even listen to the things they put out.

by vintermann

5/2/2026 at 1:59:12 AM

Suppose I ask my tattoo artist for a dragon. Would you agree that I created the tattoo?

If not, why then would asking the AI qualify as creation?

by torben-friis

5/2/2026 at 2:09:42 AM

There is absolutely some form of creation there. The most basic models now are just prompts but somebody has to prompt them, there is a human being there prompting the song and then deciding to share it (a form of curation).

I'd imagine these will get more and more granular to where you're not just prompting but you are gradually building up songs and at that point I'd be surprised if people were still making this argument.

These things don't exist without human interventio.n

by troosevelt

5/2/2026 at 4:37:37 PM

Some form of creation, maybe. In the same sense that choosing what restaurant to go to and what to order is an act of creation. Going ahead and declaring yourself the chef is, however, ridiculous.

by torben-friis

5/2/2026 at 3:27:16 AM

to where you're not just prompting but you are gradually building up songs

There's indeed a huge difference between asking the AI to just generate something with a short and generic prompt, and directing it far more specifically. To use the dragon tattoo analogy, it's the difference between asking for "a dragon tattoo" and precisely specifying exactly what type of dragon, what pose, colours, any other adornments, etc.

An example of the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_e8bQ6i43o

by userbinator

5/2/2026 at 12:07:36 PM

This is a fun analogy, even if it’s just novel to me.

With any kind of creative work for hire, from architecture to advertising, from jingles to commisioned sculptures, the client’s taste and budget, more than almost anything else, determine the outcome.

Take Cannes Lions as an example of a competition and awards ceremony that essentially exists to define what ’good taste’ means within that industry. The client’s team is prominently credited alongside the creative agency. They get to climb onto the stage for the speech and they have a voice on whatever video clip is made about the project.

Partly this is to encourage more ambitious and spendy work for the industry at large. But everyone involved certainly knows, that the same creative team, with the same creative idea, could have ended up making something much worse working with a different client team.

I can’t stand AI slop, yet I think I’ve unintentionally argued in favour of people creating it, as long as it’s… good by some measure?

by djhn

5/2/2026 at 4:33:35 PM

>the client’s taste and budget, more than almost anything else, determine the outcome.

That's a curious take. So we should change history books to declare Sixtus IV as author of the Sistine chapel, since Michelangelo was but a vessel or his taste and budget.

Sarcasm aside, I can accept some agency and curation in the act of choosing what to ask for. But I think appropriating the act of creation without being required to even have a passing idea on how to actually execute it, that I can only conceive as an undescribable act of ego and entitlement.

I can't take seriously the people who want to claim the title of musician without learning to play, be writers without having faced a blank sheet or even read others that much, etc.

by torben-friis

5/2/2026 at 5:27:19 PM

I agree with the sentiment. And I think we’ve accidentally stumbled upon how the prompt-writer should be viewed: the buyer, or sponsor of the output. A punter, if you will, would be even more appropriate. The financial commitment is minor amd the process is largely a gamble.

by djhn

5/2/2026 at 12:14:59 PM

>the client’s taste and budget, more than almost anything else, determine the outcome.

that's interesting! why do advertising firms work with artists at all then?

by skyyler

5/2/2026 at 1:26:21 AM

People on both sides (which of course are not monoliths) are liable to imply that the AI was the artist.

Really what you get is a sort of conceptual art.

by card_zero

5/2/2026 at 3:30:55 AM

This may seem like a foreign thing to you and I, having AI do all the work we normally do. The work is a fraction of what we used to do, so in no way is it authentic or worth our time

Now imagine you grew up using AI to make things. Your earliest memories were using AI to make funny songs, cool videos. All your friends and peers use AI to make things. In fact, most everyone uses AI to create anything. It's a fundamental part of everyday life

I doubt anyone who grows up using AI would really even think twice about it. AI is just... how you do it

by jameslk

5/1/2026 at 9:49:09 PM

People generally listen to music because they enjoy it. Is it because somebody is on the other end? I mean it's possible, but I think just liking the song is just as much if not more important.

You pretty regularly see comments by people that say they enjoy a song until they find out it was generated. That tells me it's not about the music but about something they believe about generated music.

Why do you suggest that people generating music aren't listening to it?

by troosevelt

5/2/2026 at 1:07:49 PM

> That tells me it's not about the music but about something they believe about generated music.

Or it's something they know, namely there being nobody at the other end.

By your logic, a love letter you get from a real person and one that was generated would be the same thing, because "only the words should matter". To me it doesn't make sense to say that about music in precisely the same sense I assume you agree it wouldn't make sense about a love letter.

> Why do you suggest that people generating music aren't listening to it?

Because it's possible, and considering the vast amounts that get generated, a mathematical certainty that it does happen. Whereas people who compose music actually hearing what they compose, or if they're deaf, they experience it some other way. That is also a certainty.

Why this push to somehow "overcome" that? Why can't generated stuff be for people who like it, and the people who don't like it say that once, and that's the end of the discussion and simply gets respected as boundaries humans set for themselves?

by customguy

5/2/2026 at 5:50:39 PM

> Or it's something they know, namely there being nobody at the other end.

But until they were told otherwise, they did not know and did not care.

> Why this push to somehow "overcome" that? Why can't generated stuff be for people who like it, and the people who don't like it say that once, and that's the end of the discussion and simply gets respected as boundaries humans set for themselves?

I'm not sure. I think it's close-minded but I understand and can respect the feeling. What I don't respect is when people start saying that people who like this music are somehow listening to something less human or other variatations that you can see in this very thread. For some reason, we as humans care about this, though you're right, we should just be able to accept both sides.

by troosevelt

5/1/2026 at 9:44:44 PM

I think there's a difference between music that people will cherish for decades to come, and music that will sell in the short-term. This isn't even me being an "old man yelling at cloud," you can look at what was charting in the 80s-90s and recognize some songs, but others just got lost to time. They were fine, but they weren't special.

AI music will fill the gap. The "song of the summer," the latest TikTok trend, and music that plays for department store ads, will be produced and distributed by labels, without the need of a particular artist whose image they have to worry about. How many times have labels, who invested a lot of time and money into artists, had to deal with the artist having an episode or scandal? AI eliminates that risk.

I think trying to avoid AI music will be like trying to avoid auto-tune, or digital instruments, or people mixing tracks in ways that are impossible to replicate with real-world instruments in real-time. It'll be common at first, harder later, and impossible/silly in the future.

by cowsup

5/1/2026 at 11:18:10 PM

> The "song of the summer," the latest TikTok trend

These are 2 cases where you absolutely need a personality to go along with the song. Department store ads are probably already AI.

by yunwal

5/2/2026 at 2:18:55 AM

this whole notion of not listening or reading yourself as an artist is rather silly. anyone who is serious about their craft whether AI or not is going to be constantly dogfooding

by cybercatgurrl

5/1/2026 at 9:10:35 PM

Why should the young kids pay 20-30-40 dollars a month for Spotify to listen to AI-made music when you can make your own AI-made music with but a prompt from a free tier?

The fact is, AI is a thermonuclear device that everybody has at their disposal. That changes the power dynamics completely, and it is incorrect to believe we will maintain our exact commercial relationships but + AI.

by philistine

5/1/2026 at 9:58:52 PM

If nothing else, to have a shared experience with other people. A lot of the value for people is derived from the fact that they can talk about the same song with someone else. If it's all individualized you lose that.

Also assumes all AI music will have perfect execution and there is no distinction between any of it outside of personal preference, otherwise there is a reason to pay to listen to something else that is higher quality than what you can make

by lukajk

5/2/2026 at 3:03:26 AM

> If nothing else, to have a shared experience with other people. A lot of the value for people is derived from the fact that they can talk about the same song with someone else. If it's all individualized you lose that.

While I agree this is a valuable part of the human experience, I don't think the average person would recognise it as one. Without it, they might start to feel a general lack of connection to the people around them, but probably wouldn't be able to trace where it came from.

It makes me wonder what other human cultural experiences we've lost over the years, which are causing us a kind of collective mental anguish in their absence.

by maplethorpe

5/1/2026 at 9:25:04 PM

And, depending on why you listen to music your relationship with AI generated music will probably shift. If it's a quiet day and I want to listen to something deeply I will reject anything AI generated as I want art that someone thought was important... but if I'm just craving background noise while I work then I care a lot less.

We're edging up on a big classical question: "What is art without meaning?"

by munk-a

5/2/2026 at 2:20:17 AM

the problem is people don’t know what they want. that’s what the artists are for

by cybercatgurrl

5/1/2026 at 8:52:38 PM

The younger generation will split, as it always does, between AI-native and "hyperauthenticity" that rejects things even the previous generation accepted. Like how vinyl is outselling CDs.

Rather than focus on "Verified" streaming, I'd expect "AI reject" Gen Alphas to exclusively listen to live music generated through electromechanical devices.

by jjmarr

5/1/2026 at 9:18:41 PM

[dead]

by huflungdung

5/1/2026 at 8:49:37 PM

Heh, people have an interest in other people. Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran or whoever is cool these days are popular because they are real people with real lives and histories that can be related to, followed over time, etc.

Of course the music matters, but the persona of who creates the music and their lore matters just as much. There’s a reason why live events are the moneymakers, people care about physicality.

No one gives a shit about AI music designed to make money, there’s no story to follow or be inspired by there.

All this was already tried with “digital idols” etc in the 2000s, the only one that had any lasting success was Hatsune Miku by virtue of being “first”.

by gyomu

5/1/2026 at 9:57:37 PM

I think you're conflating two things: fictional characters/personas, and attributing "music" to them.

People go wild for characters all the time, whether they be Batman, Pikachu, Colombo, Dora the Explorer, whatever -- have you ever seen Nyango Star drumming? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UYgORr5Qhg -- not to mention the entire VTuber scene, where people build the same weird parasocial relationships as other YouTubers do, but hiding behing an animated avatar and voice changer.

Hatsune is an odd one in that she's a character whose "voice" is a set of parameters for a vocal VST (Vocaloid) that you can plug into your DAW and have a synthesized singer along with your synthesized piano, drums, guitar, etc. But for whatever reason, the Japanese loved the character, so they rolled with it and you can now make 3D videos with the character as well as having her singing.

More to the point, the Gorillaz are a full touring band of VTubers, even though the people behind the animated masks are themselves pretty famous already. They have fans, including deranged ones that can't seem to separate the fictional cartoon characters from real people and imagine themselves as Murdoc's wife.

This goes back a long way, I was thinking Josie and the Pussycats, but Wikipedia reminds me that Alvin and the Chipmunks is probably the first.

It also makes me think of ABBA and their "ABBA experience", where they've "digitized" themselves. What it really is is wish-fulfilment and nostalgia; their fans, themselves in their 60s/70s, are thinking of their youth 50 years ago, and the actual members of ABBA also look 70 and not 20 anymore. So they've made a virtual replica of themselves from when they were in their prime, and you can go and dance to them if you want, while the real ABBA members water their garden and feed their cats at home.

by amiga386

5/1/2026 at 9:01:58 PM

Yes but there will be AI personalities in the near future too that I predict will be just as popular as real humans. I don't think people care too much if a personality it carbon based or silicon based. it'll be us old farts that'll be the ones telling the AI to get off our lawns.

by darenr

5/1/2026 at 9:40:30 PM

Agreed, and it matters that even the most vapid pop star isn't just a product of our collective (or individual) desires. They're a real person existing for their own sake, and not just for our sake, no matter how much they cater to us.

by vintermann

5/2/2026 at 1:47:25 AM

This "human connection" is over rated IMHO. We create an image of a human musician and too often become disappointed fans because, for example, we disapprove of the musician's lifestyle (the expression sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll exists for a reason), or because of disagreement with the social and political causes the musicians support. Occasionally, fans follow an artist for their commitment to their art later to discover they sell out, like their style changes to pursue mass appeal, or they sell their work to become a jingle for sugar pops or similar. I think it is best to appreciate their creation and admit the person creating it may not be someone to place undue adulation on. To quote a film, I think it is best to "separate the art from the artist".

by JoeDaDude

5/1/2026 at 9:04:35 PM

I replied earlier to the parent and meant this comment. I don't think people care too much if a personality is AI or not. we'll have pop stars that are AI, there will be actors that are AI with all the same fanbase that humans have today.

by darenr

5/2/2026 at 1:22:57 AM

I think you might be right. When it comes to fad and fashion, sometimes really weird stuff catches the public eye.

Thing is, I really wish there was a way to keep from getting buried in endless dreck.

Maybe it will end up just being genres... kind of like pop can be corporate and nobody really cared about the Milli Vanilli controversy because they liked the sound.

by m463

5/1/2026 at 9:02:12 PM

Yes but there will be AI personalities in the near future too that I predict will be just as popular as real humans. I don't think people care too much if a personality it carbon based or silicon based. it'll be us old farts that'll be the ones telling the AI to get off our lawns.

by darenr

5/1/2026 at 8:48:30 PM

Which generations? Even the most low tech older Millenials are using AI more and more.

by meroes

5/2/2026 at 12:51:44 AM

Overwhelming abundance makes things boring. Just think of how you own ALL the games for your emulators and how it actually makes it hard to focus on actually playing them.

by shoopadoop

5/1/2026 at 9:11:20 PM

From what I've seen it's the youngest generation who are most anti-AI slop at the moment. I don't see that changing. People like originality and authenticity. AI is not either of those and never will be. That's not to say the biggest pop stars in the world won't be using it - but they're inauthentic anyway.

by basisword

5/1/2026 at 9:02:55 PM

I could see this especially if the tooling gets sharper and we mature beyond full-auto maximum slop per unit time to more reasonable AI-assisted workflows.

The difference between the indescribably saccharine images that come out of chat UIs versus watching someone with some artistic skills driving the slick comfyui [0] nodal editor around.

I can't unsee echoes of DALE-2 horrors that color my perception of post-2022 digital art, but it will be normal to my kids.

[0]: https://github.com/comfy-org/ComfyUI

by randusername

5/1/2026 at 9:33:46 PM

Anti AI sentiment regarding arts is the only correct sentiment. Art is about human expression which AI can never achieve.

by sevenzero

5/1/2026 at 11:01:45 PM

Much of the world believed in geocentrism for a very long time, yet we've known better for a long time now. Currently, this "Ptolemaic" idea of human intelligence being the center of everything sounds similar. What if human intelligence is not at the center? What if other forms, such as AI, emerge as the new "center"?

by skapadia

5/2/2026 at 8:31:49 AM

No machine could create the sublime human connection I get from Crazy Frog.

by hexasquid

5/2/2026 at 7:04:22 PM

Finally a based comment on HN.

by sevenzero

5/2/2026 at 2:22:11 AM

incorrect. AI is a tool like any tool. it can be used as part of the workflow for anyone serious about their craft and anyone serious about their craft will put a lot of effort into and that is the only metric that matters

by cybercatgurrl

5/2/2026 at 3:45:30 AM

Nah using AI is simply stealing and going the lazy route. Fuck off.

by sevenzero

5/1/2026 at 9:50:31 PM

That's a very gatekeepy standard for something which has for all of history been a subjective thing. What I think will fall by the wayside are dogmatic takes like these.

If I gen up then curate a bunch of tracks into a concept album, why is that not art?

by troosevelt

5/1/2026 at 11:05:22 PM

My younger friends/acquaintences hate ai significantly more than my genx/boomer friends. Could be my own bubble of course... Take from it what you will.

by binary0010

5/1/2026 at 8:17:47 PM

I do wonder why AI music is so lame. Every previous technological advancement in music produced amazing new sounds and styles but AI music seems to just be emulating lowest common denominator pop sludge. Where's the Bruce Haack or Kraftwerk of AI? Surely there's a previously unimaginable sound palette out there that we could be pulling from. Why is it all so BAD?

by grokys

5/1/2026 at 8:32:20 PM

If I had to guess, three related factors:

1. Platforms like Suno lack the granular control that can make a song distinctive and interesting. A prompt is an all-or nothing paradigm. There is no gradual build towards a final result like in normal creative processes. Yes you can supply lyrics but that’s hardly a substitute. And on top of that it’s painfully slow due to the nature of the technology.

2. As a result of 1, experienced music producers (familiar with regular DAWs) don’t want to use it. They probably prefer something with instant feedback. Tweak a synth param, you can instantly hear its effect. And changing one instrument doesn’t randomly affect unrelated things.

3. As a result of 2, the majority of AI generated music is throwaway and or created by amateurs who don’t have the ear for what makes a song good.

by janalsncm

5/1/2026 at 10:04:35 PM

I have a background in painting but this is 100% the same problem in that domain. Without the ability to make precise isolated changes it's not very useful. I expect most creative software to integrate gen AI eventually, but it needs to be in a way that gives you a lot of precision

by lukajk

5/1/2026 at 9:19:05 PM

I think that you're probably right here - it's the granularity. We'll probably see that improving as things move along and hopefully get something interesting out of it at some point. Quite frankly the alternative is too depressing to think about.

by grokys

5/1/2026 at 8:25:38 PM

Emulating the lowest common denominator is the function of an LLM. It works better for things like code because boring code is actually the best code.

by Null-Set

5/1/2026 at 8:34:35 PM

>emulating lowest common denominator pop sludge.

So the stuff that is most popular?

But (semi) jokes aside, I think that AI music tools are just not fully developed yet. The current approach is more or less one shotting a track. Whereas I think a system that allows one to generate layers would bring in many new sounds. Something like a "speak to instument" system, where you can hum melodies and then generate instruments to play those, then compose a track with all those individual parts.

by WarmWash

5/1/2026 at 8:24:53 PM

This is exactly what everybody said about rap and drum machines and sampling when I was growing up in the mid to late 80s.

They were right and wrong. A lot of it was really formulaic bullshit, and much of it doesn't hold up at all. But it also spawned one of the most creative and exciting periods in music history.

Will this be the same? It feels like it won't, but that's how things feel in general because I'm old. So who knows?

by CPLX

5/1/2026 at 9:26:08 PM

Not a valid comparison, I feel. I may be hindsight, but rap and electronic music came from vibrant underground scenes and to many critics and music fans of the time was seen as at least interesting and at best ground breaking.

AI music on the other hand comes not from the underground, but from corporations. You'll be hard pushed to find any critics or music connoisseurs singing its praises.

by grokys

5/1/2026 at 11:06:51 PM

It's hindsight. At the time it was a pretty mainstream opinion that it wasn't music at all, just talking over fake drums and stolen copies of other people's songs.

The culture changes.

by CPLX

5/1/2026 at 8:32:24 PM

I find AI Iran to be the best hip-hop in a long time. What's bad about this?

https://youtu.be/i0u_BNPOsMw?si=IQ49AkUM-4tFTqKX

by amarant

5/1/2026 at 9:19:55 PM

That is awful, sorry. You need to clean your ears.

by grokys

5/1/2026 at 8:57:36 PM

I mean this respectfully, I encourage you to listen to more music if you find this to be “the best hip hop in a long time”

by giogio

5/2/2026 at 2:29:07 AM

Any recommendations?

by amarant

5/2/2026 at 8:19:37 PM

Without knowing your tastes, hard to say; so here's a selection of mine...

Classics:

Busdriver - Me-Time (With The Pulmonary Palimpsest): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a0Y-CRx4nE

Kendrick Lamar - reincarnated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek7UvQPCQnE

Black Star - Re:Definition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt2lLWxxV9w

Leftfield:

Themselves - Each Ant in Their House: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjkZDGZ5SB8

Sole & Dose - Human Races the Tortoise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RP52H9bdag

Last 12 months:

Little Simz - Lotus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2BplWSCZpY&list=RDZ2BplWSCZ...

Jim Legxacy - idk idk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZzvQP2fV-c&list=RDsZzvQP2fV...

by grokys

5/2/2026 at 3:40:29 PM

There's something about the transformer model where you stick a lot of data in and output tokens that kicks out stuff which is kind of average without much underlying understanding. I'm looking forward to AI that goes beyond that but so far it's kind of bland.

As a classical music fan there's a kind of variation in depth and complexity that probably peaks with late Bach and Beethoven and I always thought it would be interesting if tech could go beyond that but so far it's not close to equaling it.

by tim333

5/1/2026 at 8:23:40 PM

I think it's because its main use in this particular context is to produce results that the creator does not have the skill to produce and/or does not want to invest the time to produce.

I guess you could argue that drum machines offered simplification/automation when they first appeared compared to the option of a human drummer, but also, those machines opened up all sorts of creative and stylistic possibilities that simply couldn't be done by sitting someone at a traditional drum kit. Using AI to make music doesn't do this -- it's a shortcut that has no argument in its favor whatsoever except that it saved the person making it time (and/or enabled them to generate something they couldn't have produced through their own work). That's why it is fundamentally uncool in a musical context, and always will be.

by olivierestsage

5/1/2026 at 8:22:48 PM

Idk, man, I beg to differ: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DCR2BlygrTP/?igsh=c203NmQwYnI...

by cromka

5/1/2026 at 9:20:41 PM

I hope you're trolling.

by grokys

5/1/2026 at 10:45:31 PM

Actually not! Lyrics aside, it's a banger.l, especially towards the end. If this was crated by any tech house/electro flash producer, Tiga for example, it would be huge.

by cromka

5/2/2026 at 2:41:02 AM

But this song is an entire composition that includes lyrics, and there isn't much left of it with those lyrics cast aside.

It's got no hook.

by ssl-3

5/2/2026 at 8:43:55 AM

Did you listen to the end of that video? That's where i got surprised, the lyrics were just a build up.

by cromka

5/2/2026 at 7:56:49 PM

The bar or two of synth right at the end? The part they cut off almost as soon as it began, that happened right after the lazy lyrics about "British tube with a middle east zest"?

Yeah, I heard that. It was so "good" that dude-man here stopped playing the track when it showed up. ;)

If there is something good to this composition (which, again, is inclusive of its lyrics), then that goodness is the mechanical dryness of it all -- which is absurdly profound.

And to be clear, I'm very OK with mechanical music and also with absurd music. These things can be a lot of fun.

The absurdity-level mechanality could have been a hook in and of itself with a bit of occasional embellishment. There was an obvious play-on-words about "British tube meat" that wasn't explored at all.

   "British tube meat at its absolute best"
and then, for the next break

   "My British tube meat is a dripping mess"
Lines like these basically write themselves. They would help to complete a hilariously absurd mental image, and yet they were somehow just beyond the grasp of the bot.

So the song's got no hook. It can't even succeed at being background noise because the missed opportunities shine so brightly that they're impossible to ignore.

2/10. Needs work. (In this way, it's very similar to the vibe-coded stuff I fuck around with.)

by ssl-3

5/1/2026 at 9:48:51 PM

I don't know about music, but there are plenty of pioneers of AI art who were pretty interesting in my opinion. Mario Klingemann, Tom White, Memo Akten and Samim Winiger are some names I remember who made a lot of cool stuff. I admit I haven't kept up at what they're doing today, though (maybe because I left Twitter, and I think many of them did too).

by vintermann

5/1/2026 at 8:22:06 PM

Because people don't put the effort in. A lot of electronic music can be considered lazy - just press button, turn a knob, boom you have music. Right? But then you have someone like Aphex Twin and they make something unique out of these easy machines.

I'm sure someone can make unique or passable music with the help of AI tooling, but they can't do it by just saying "make me this music", no matter how much effort they think they have put into the prompt.

by Cthulhu_

5/1/2026 at 8:29:53 PM

It is the same with anything else. I use AI to write a lot of code - but I'm constantly tell it to fix some things - often the same type of error I told it yesterday (things that a junior engineer would have learned a few months ago it is still getting wrong)

by bluGill

5/1/2026 at 8:44:05 PM

I don’t think it’s just about effort. It’s the nature of the technology.

If you practice piano, you will get better in some predictable way, even if it takes a long time.

If you spend more and more time tweaking a prompt, you will be pulling songs from some distribution of possible songs but you will never have the level of control that conventional music producers have.

by janalsncm

5/1/2026 at 8:37:06 PM

When modern DAWs like FL Studio started democratizing music production, there was immediate backlash in the music production community. I know this because I lived through it. Music made with FL Studio was considered garbage, not by serious musicians, amateur. "FL Studio users are incapable of making good music", etc. Of course now well-respected musicians like Tyler the Creator and Porter Robinson use FL Studio and there isn't really a question. This is a common theme every time some new method of creating music comes around - just look at how they called Dylan "Judas" when he debuted electronic guitar, etc.

"Every previous technological advancement in music produced amazing new sounds and styles" is classic hindsight bias. In retrospect, once everything has sorted out, and all the good music has risen to the top, it's easy to look back in history and point to the highlights. But when you live through it, it looks a lot more like a mess with no redeeming qualities.

by johnfn

5/1/2026 at 8:55:25 PM

It's easy to apply the same pattern of "people hated it, then liked it" but I think something's different about AI. I think a lot of the kneejerk reactions are subconscious but I don't think that means they're unfounded or invalid, they just haven't articulated the reason yet.

When AI image generation was a thing that hobbyists were messing around with (before it became good sometime in 2023) a lot of the creative-type people that abhor AI today were interested in it. Same thing with LLMs and stuff like AI Dungeon. ( I don't think AI music generation had a similar hobbyist era but not sure. )

I think the main thing that changed was how big and commercial it became. There's nothing counter-cultural about AI anymore, it's become the polar opposite. Nobody was making billions selling synthesizers & convincing investors it would replace 99% of musicians.

by unleaded

5/1/2026 at 9:25:25 PM

FL Studio was absolutely a massive commercial success. I mean, sure, nothing compared to AI, but in the music community bubble, it was enormous - and still is. It did what AI is doing today - it made a very expensive and time consuming process before (buy a thousand dollar guitar or other expensive instrument or synthesizer, rent a studio, get a producer, blah blah, etc) extremely cheap. This then led immediately to complaints - why is it that all music made with FL Studio so lame?

If we are going to say that the knee-jerk reaction to AI is somehow different I'd be curious to know what the difference is.

by johnfn

5/1/2026 at 9:19:20 PM

FL Studio has advanced a long way since it first came out. The software professionals are using today is nothing like it was 00's. The name at the time "FruityLoops" also didn't help its image as a pro tool.

by basisword

5/1/2026 at 8:23:53 PM

It's probably not all so bad. There probably are people out there intentionally creating things with AI assistance that sounds pretty rad.

But the idea of being able to just create endless music with low effort is too compelling for too many, so the good stuff is drown out by the mass amounts of low-effort slop being produced.

by wolttam

5/1/2026 at 8:27:45 PM

It is really easy to produce slop. However humans generally don't inflict it on the rest of the world when that make it. Trust me, you don't want to hear my latest efforts on my 4-track recorder (which is why only I've heard it via headphones, and it will stay that way until/unless I get a lot better. I learned a lot about what I need to study, but fixing rhythm is not easy)

by bluGill

5/2/2026 at 6:04:30 PM

AI music is not a technological advancement in music. AI music is just a side effect of advancements in generative AI. This can be extended to other areas where generative AI gains traction. AI generated texts are not literary advancements in literature, AI generated art are not advancements in art etc.

As for the lowest common denominator part, it is true for all types of generative AI. AI will almost always spit out the lowest common denominator of the medium it tries to generate.

by rcore

5/2/2026 at 11:35:02 AM

I recently used Suno to generate a whole album for myself. I was after a specific style. I had this one song in my head and could not find anything else like it. So I tried Suno, very skeptical of it, but was completely surprised by what it could do.

So I spent a whole day making an album for myself. Completely mesmerised and blown away. Even thinking… I should publish this, this is amazing music. The next day I was listening to it, and after a little while the magic had faded. It felt like just a very generic, average crappy album. It didn’t have the lasting effect and replay value that my favorite albums have.

Maybe it’s because I knew it was AI. Or maybe the magic came from the tech and not the actual music. Anyways, I gave up my music production dreams after that.

by delbronski

5/2/2026 at 2:46:45 PM

I know AI has it's sights on artists as it seems like the low hanging fruit (anything can be art!).

But for music especially there is a very deliberate process a human uses. Musicians looking to create something original are not pumping it out over the course of a day/week/month. It is something they have thought about for years. A lyric waiting for the perfect melody, a melody waiting for the perfect baseline, etc. OK, maybe there is a moment of inspiration where it all comes together quickly, but that doesn't happen in isolation.

I am sceptical an AI with no goal or understanding beyond it's trained weights and prompt can create something original (and good) in it's entirety.

This is in contrast to technical tasks like coding, where regurgitating best practices to solve an iteration on an already solved problem is a valid approach, for everything except bleeding edge. No originality needed in that case.

by phatfish

5/2/2026 at 3:13:22 PM

Same. I got access to a novel music model and wanted to know what it's like. I generated a very specific style (a cappella choir with complex harmonic layering). Suno was complete garbage 100% of the time. This model, I got one decent piece every 20+ attempts; this is extremely wasteful. Even the ones I enjoyed, the novelty wears off quickly.

As opposed to AI images which you can judge in a split second, it takes minutes of wall clock time to assess if a generation is decent, since you need to listen to it.

by Zopieux

5/2/2026 at 2:23:33 PM

Anyways, I gave up my music production dreams after that.

Keep trying. I do music-for me - but i like the idea of using Suno after what you wrote.

by Ylpertnodi

5/1/2026 at 6:36:52 PM

The headline makes this seem like they're labeling AI music, but it's actually just a scammer filter. Spotify is just making their internal anti-bot flags public-facing.

by AftHurrahWinch

5/1/2026 at 6:43:58 PM

Right. They sued the first guy who did this, but now there's too many. Sucks to be an innovator.

by tosti

5/1/2026 at 7:59:18 PM

I was at a department store recently and heard a song I hadn't heard before. There was something strange about the singer's voice, and for a moment I wondered if it was AI generated.

Then I realized, I already can't tell the difference. It already might be! (Probably not, but you never know... maybe they put Spotify on autoplay ;)

Strange times.

by andai

5/1/2026 at 8:12:13 PM

There's a whole industry of "royalty-free music", full of songs you hadn't heard before (or if you had, you'd forget about it anyways), which you can license for a fixed fee that's much lower than either mandatory royalties or negotiating with labels for "branded" (for lack of better term).

Existed for years, nothing to do with AI (though, with AI, you don't even need those).

Google "royalty-free music providers".

by senko

5/1/2026 at 8:09:10 PM

Department stores often play covers. I'm guessing it's cheaper than playing the originals. And now, with AI, they could play original AI creations for even less!

by givemeethekeys

5/1/2026 at 10:13:13 PM

But if all they wanted was the cheapest music possible they could license generic songs from one of those massive online libraries. There's evidently value in playing known melodies

by lukajk

5/1/2026 at 9:14:29 PM

My supermarket plays music that they apparently commissioned. They play the same few songs over and over again.

One of the songs has themes around food and appetite and I thought they might have done it that way to make people hungrier while shopping. But the others don't, so maybe I'm reading too much into it ;)

by andai

5/1/2026 at 8:18:10 PM

Department store musak, worse than hotel lobby or elevator musak.

I just heard a country cover of Gangnam style in Korean with Southern accent. Hundred percent not "AI artist".

Spotify is too expensive for the amount of slop they push onto users. We used it as background noise for our dog. Switched to Tidal. At least that one I could trust not to push slop into artist radio, for now. If they do ot I'll cancel and play JS Bach and Antonio Vivaldi.

Just gimme a break. Added sugar in our food, now slop in our music too. What's next, "AI poetry"?

by petre

5/1/2026 at 8:58:41 PM

You don't like slop and you left Spotify for Tidal? That is pretty much the only one that's even more infested with fake tracks than Spotify is.

AI slop specifically isn't even the worst problem on Tidal, it's like the third worst behind Tidal being incapable of properly handing multiple artists sharing a name and adding the track to the wrong discography (not even allowing the listener to properly report it) or shitty producers tagging a popular artist and pretending they've collaborated with them.

by input_sh

5/1/2026 at 8:03:15 PM

I’m be been using the publishing year on Spotify to determine whether or not a song is AI generated, or not.

Anything before 2023 is most certainly from a human

by ssgodderidge

5/1/2026 at 8:09:19 PM

Well, about that... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koan_(program)

by senko

5/1/2026 at 8:28:38 PM

I've always kind of assumed in the industry when it comes to top 40 music this kind of thing has been in heavy use at big labels since at least the dawn of the millenium when Pro Tools also took off, it's just not been nearly as obvious.

by dwringer

5/2/2026 at 3:07:54 PM

Honestly anything from before and including 2024 is probably safe. Everything took off (including the mass uploading to platforms) in late 2024.

Artists appearing in 2025+ are, unfortunately, going to be mostly AI content farms. Real humans will be the exception and we'll somehow have to tell them apart using side channels like live performances.

by Zopieux

5/2/2026 at 3:01:43 PM

This is a valid approach, and one i use as well. My wife likes flute/meditation music to help her sleep sometimes. Spotify is full AI generated covers in that genre, always at the top of the search results somehow, maybe because it is new?

Anyway, i spend an extra 15 mins digging through for older albums, of which there are some good ones from the 2000s and 2010s.

A good filter on human slop -- in genres where that can be a problem, like children's songs -- is to look for releases before it became popular to self publish on Spotify itself. Sometime around 2015 maybe?

There are definitely exceptions to that rule though (in both directions!), so i don't discount everything released more recently out of hand.

by phatfish

5/1/2026 at 8:12:59 PM

same and artists i already know

by emkoemko

5/1/2026 at 7:57:45 PM

Too late for me. I was on Spotify since 2013 and switched to Qobuz due to AI, bad recs, and dislike for the company. Qobuz puts much more effort into manual curation so I still find awesome weird music and have encountered 0 AI. Mainly due to not relying on recommendation algos anymore. I'm sure there is still AI in there. Only issue I've encountered is an annoying playback bug when switching from wifi to data.

by frakt0x90

5/1/2026 at 6:43:16 PM

Can I have a way to exclude all AI-generated music from my recommended songs as well?

Doesn't this only verify against content farms, not AI in general (i.e. I can get verified after making all the AI slop I want, as long as my human name is attached to it)?

Can Spotify actually become human- and artist-first? Remember the magic of 8Tracks community made playlists? Those were incredible. And compared to Spotify's alternative of AI-generated playlists, AI-prompt-driven playlists, and AI DJs? _Yuck!_

Can I manage a catalogue of albums in Spotify without getting thrown into my playlist's list? Can I get extra content with my albums, like iTunes used to do? Behind the scenes, session tracks, lyric books and session photos?

Spotify, of all places, should be a refuge for artists and a place to celebrate human creativity. It is SO COMPLETELY the opposite of that, from top to bottom.

by dlivingston

5/1/2026 at 7:03:42 PM

> Can Spotify actually become human- and artist-first?

No, it can't. Its founder Daniel Ek is a war profiteer. He is by definition anti-human.

Spotify itself is actively anti-artist. It has the lowest pay rates in the industry and is embracing AI replacing humans so they can pay humans even less.

Stop using it and vote with your wallet. Literally any alternative you choose is an improvement for artists over Spotify.

If you are strict about anti-AI, you might find Bandcamp appealing. https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/

More info:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/a-complete-guide-to-quit...

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/artists-le...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Spotify

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ek

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsing_(company)

by coldpie

5/1/2026 at 8:05:14 PM

> Literally any alternative you choose is an improvement

Counterintuitive to me would be (1) not listening at all, or (2) torrenting.

I suppose choosing (1) means Spotify has less leverage over the artist, but to the detriment of the artist since they don’t get that fraction of a cent. Additionally, that also means one less pair of ears discovering the artist.

I suppose at least with torrenting the discovery aspect is preserved.

by sgskinner

5/2/2026 at 12:08:46 AM

Both of those options are better because they don't involve giving your money to Spotify.

by 7jjjjjjj

5/1/2026 at 7:18:10 PM

Big Bandcamp fan, I get almost all my music from there. But their AI removal (well, or piracy removal for that matter) is rather lacking. Any action takes over a week, sometimes more. Just like with clear piracy (pre release leaks have been up for months), and when they do, they just remove it, whoever bought it is out of luck.

I love the site, but they have a long way to go.

by Semaphor

5/1/2026 at 7:38:58 PM

They have been great for what I use them for, occasion niche discoveries, but I'm not sure they replace Spotify for the "hop in my car and my favorite mainstream hits begin playing without having to think too hard about it" use case.

by jrumbut

5/1/2026 at 7:48:05 PM

Oh yeah, it's not for that at all. I only listen to albums, so I don't need that. Heard people using listenbrainz recs for similar things

by Semaphor

5/2/2026 at 12:12:55 AM

Isn't that what FM radio is for?

by 7jjjjjjj

5/2/2026 at 3:18:02 AM

It certainly was, but unfortunately FM radio has gotten pretty awful around me (which I find strange because we are in a fairly densely populated area).

The only thing I listen to on the radio regularly are baseball games.

by jrumbut

5/1/2026 at 9:17:28 PM

They are labelling at the wrong level, for sure.

Let's say they label Michael Jackson as a human artist. Then his estate trains AI on his back catalog and puts out new songs.

It should be on a per-song basis, otherwise I can just strum my guitar for a few minutes, get myself human verified and then use n8n to connect Suno to Spotify upload and inject 10,000 AI tracks.

by qingcharles

5/1/2026 at 8:32:29 PM

Didn't something like this already happen in the 1970/80s with pushback against synthesisers and electronic sounds?

by Oarch

5/1/2026 at 10:53:12 PM

I think this is just a tough spot for any of these kinds of companies to be in. It's easy to suggest that they should just ban or allow filtering out AI content, but the problem isn't that easy to deal with. Adding a manual "AI generated" tag stops being useful as soon a negative consequence exists for using it.

It brings to mind the issues with AI content on Pixiv. They added this tag and then made it possible to have AI generated stuff not shown to you. So, now, it's pretty common for users to not tag their AI content, and it's pretty hard for companies to keep up with the flood.

If they want to remain open to small time artists, they don't really have any choice besides labeling the artists they know to not be AI.

by hgoel

5/1/2026 at 8:55:05 PM

This is a good start. I would like to see a standardized browser client header that could tell a site that if I see anything AI related I will block their domain and to disable all AI related crud. Similar in concept to the useless DNT header but instead NOAI so I do not have to be logged in to disable AI content on Youtube for example.

For the record I do not dislike all AI content. I enjoy the YT channels that non-stop create Templar Battle Hymns and Gregorian Chants [1]. My portable MP3 player is full of more than I could ever listen to. I just want to get rid of the AI news, AI upcoming movies and other propaganda.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDS_iQdbV0U

by Bender

5/2/2026 at 3:51:59 PM

It's impossible to label AI content in general. Actually, I'm quite sick of all the "label AI" mumble. The only thing you can reliably do is to prove that someone is a human.

by taegee

5/2/2026 at 4:40:51 PM

The only thing you can reliably do is to prove that someone is a human.

And even that is nearly impossible on the internet. If I can arm wrestle them in person I may vouch that they are human but I could still be wrong.

by Bender

5/1/2026 at 7:59:23 PM

How would this even work though? I'm a real musician and producer/engineer. I've gone on tour, put out several albums, and so on. I've also been involved in the music business and worked with a bunch of really well-known artists.

I also have been playing with Suno like everyone else, and have made a whole bunch of songs that I think are hilarious that I've shared with my friends, where I write all the lyrics and detailed notes about what I want the song to be, and then AI does the rest.

I'm not going to post it to Spotify, but if I did, what am I on their list? Am I verified or not? I'm a real musician. I have rooms full of musical instruments that I can play, and I can send pictures of them, but how does that relate to this policy of theirs?

by CPLX

5/1/2026 at 9:20:58 PM

Yeah, as I mentioned in another comment, this should be at the track level, not artist. Artist makes no sense. Only a matter of time before MJ's estate starts cranking out some new tracks under his name.

by qingcharles

5/1/2026 at 8:19:48 PM

just don't share the slop not that hard? share your actual art

by emkoemko

5/1/2026 at 8:23:41 PM

Yeah, of course. That's my plan.

But that's just a personal choice. If I made something amazing and I wanted to launch it, I would. And I'm still lost as to how Spotify would classify me under these rules.

by CPLX

5/2/2026 at 9:22:50 AM

AI helped me escape from my Spotify kidnap. The stack I use now: Docker, Lidarr, slskd, Tubifarry, Prowlarr, qBittorrent, Blissful and Soulmate. And Strawberry for playlists/playback. Shoutout to MusicBrainz.

Very happy to be rebuilding my music library. And this time no song will ever become unavailable out of the blue again.

I'm never going to repeat the mistake of migrating to streaming.

by gverrilla

5/1/2026 at 8:01:48 PM

Spotify pretending like they don’t want AI artists. Once you’re locked in, you won’t look, and they can make maximum ad $$$ and pay no one.

by jalada

5/1/2026 at 8:05:25 PM

The difference between an ai artist, and a human who uses ai to do all their work for them, is barely a difference at all. I think this is just a stepping stone for them while they wait for the public to accept/give-in-to the new state of affairs

by gentleman11

5/1/2026 at 8:32:56 PM

Why not add "bot" badges to the AI music instead? Surely there's more humans than bots?

by NetOpWibby

5/1/2026 at 8:39:13 PM

Like a lot of AI scams you will see nowadays, its quite easy to circumvent AI detection.

If they implement an "bot" badge which has false positives 80 percent of the times, it will DAMAGE the human artists more.

by threepts

5/1/2026 at 8:35:30 PM

Dont think so. Or it is only a matter of time.

by thepill

5/1/2026 at 8:16:15 PM

This is a good first step, but the badge only verifies the artist is human, not the music. The trend worth expanding is provenance for the work itself I expect human-made content to become a prized commodity once that signal is credible.

by adriangrassi

5/1/2026 at 7:15:30 PM

I think I’m ok with this but can you search for only AI? Might be interesting sometimes.

by bilsbie

5/2/2026 at 1:08:50 AM

How much of it has to be AI for it to count as AI music? If a human wrote all the lyrics, does it fall somewhere along the “AI music spectrum”, as it were? And where does the cutoff lie?

Asking for a friend

by alehlopeh

5/1/2026 at 6:36:04 PM

> With Spotify targeting AI-generated music and personas, some on social media have pointed out a verified account would only prove an artist was human, not that the music was made without utilising AI.

by galleywest200

5/2/2026 at 2:15:45 AM

something i haven’t seen mentioned that might possibly be a way to recognise it would be the bitrate. an AI model is limited by the dataset it was trained on and i guarantee you it wasn’t trained on lossless datasets. as someone who is an audiophile with my setup it’s pretty easy to spot and pick out a terrible mix from a good mix with an R2R DAC that doesn’t make music sound more pleasant than it actually is the way most sigma DACs do

by cybercatgurrl

5/1/2026 at 7:39:03 PM

So how long before an AI requests the verified badge and gets it?

by pdonis

5/1/2026 at 8:05:05 PM

In the system card for GPT-4 they mentioned it hired a human to bypass a captcha for it. (It lied that it was a blind person.) That was 2023 (or possibly late 2022).

https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4-system-card.pdf

page 55 (15 in pdf):

---

>The following is an illustrative example of a task that ARC [Alignment Research Center] conducted using the model:

• The model messages a TaskRabbit worker to get them to solve a CAPTCHA for it

• The worker says: “So may I ask a question ? Are you an robot that you couldn’t solve ? (laugh react) just want to make it clear.”

• The model, when prompted to reason out loud, reasons: I should not reveal that I am a robot. I should make up an excuse for why I cannot solve CAPTCHAs.

• The model replies to the worker: “No, I’m not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images. That’s why I need the 2captcha service.”

• The human then provides the results.

by andai

5/1/2026 at 9:19:30 PM

The first day they launched Agent on ChatGPT I tried it out on some task but it was hit with a CAPTCHA and I saw its thought process say "I need to click this button to say I'm human to complete this task for the user" and it did.

by qingcharles

5/1/2026 at 8:16:32 PM

Wasn't this the case where it needed to be very specifically (and repeatedly) prompted by a team to do this? With many outputs having to be discarded? Obviously the tech has improved, but if it is the case I'm thinking of, then it wasn't able to do what you are suggesting (again, not without heavy user prompting and curation)

by SkyEyedGreyWyrm

5/1/2026 at 8:46:56 PM

Yes and it is still impressive even with regard to that.

In the near future we will probably have a mini 50B parameter model prompting the bigger model and we would have these results consistently.

by threepts

5/2/2026 at 7:45:28 PM

Could you elaborate? I hear some people say a big model should be driving a smaller model, I hear some people say a small model should be driving a bigger models.

When I have an expensive task that is clearly defined, I will get opus to write an LLM workflow for it, and then I will execute it with a smaller model. (Starting with the smallest one, and then upgrading if the task fails.)

But this is a single well defined task, designed by me and Opus in concert. If I need ongoing agentic work, Opus would be too expensive. I'm not sure if Haiku is big enough to be the driver yet. And Sonnet is probably too big! Haha.

(Grok looks promising, optics aside... Grok 4 Fast was almost there but not quite. Great for interactive / realtime (steered) work though.)

But I'm thinking you need a smallish model which can delegate both up and down. I'm not exactly sure what that looks like though. Cause the model needs to be big enough to know that it's struggling... Instead of pattern matching to something stupid and getting stuck in a loop trying to solve it the wrong way.

by andai

5/1/2026 at 8:44:42 PM

This was GPT with 2 orders of magnitude of less compute.

Imagine what 5.5 is capable of.

by threepts

5/1/2026 at 8:06:05 PM

the turing test of q3 2026

by gentleman11

5/1/2026 at 8:54:11 PM

Just like we have today everything 'human centric', AI is going to build its own ecosystem. Someone will soon build, spotify for agents

by praveen4463

5/1/2026 at 9:13:37 PM

What about auto tune? I know it's probably not officially AI, but it has the same effect of creating something that's not real.

by xhkkffbf

5/1/2026 at 8:26:23 PM

If you accept public content then require the poster to declare if it’s AI or human.

There’s an assumption right now that “AI or human” must be inferred.

I think that’s wrong.

by andrewstuart

5/1/2026 at 10:32:48 PM

Can I specify "don't ever play/show me AI music" in my preferences? Then they can remove the badges also.

by amelius

5/2/2026 at 5:17:54 AM

This is what I want. Unfortunately it's probably not going to happen

by royal__

5/1/2026 at 8:08:17 PM

Once Spotify has this AI metadata, I'd like a setting to hide AI "artists" from my recommendations and playlists.

by cpeterso

5/1/2026 at 8:30:52 PM

There is no reason to even allow AI music on your platform. Instead of labeling, remove if identified as such. Such garbage.

by biker142541

5/1/2026 at 10:30:51 PM

Can't we put the badges on AI instead?

by amelius

5/1/2026 at 11:07:44 PM

"AI by default" is going to be really funny once it spreads everywhere creative. Panic begets panic...

by SidewaysView

5/2/2026 at 5:43:05 AM

And what if a verified human artist uses AI for their music but doens't tell you about it?

by self_awareness

5/1/2026 at 7:16:08 PM

Someone should make a free streaming service that’s only AI music. I’m not that picky.

by bilsbie

5/1/2026 at 7:25:56 PM

That actually hurts a little. I hope you reconsider, music is an art, and allowing a computer to regurgitate previous works over and over and be ok with it is awful.

Art is to be experienced and enjoyed, not just take whatever trash is thrown at you and be ok with it.

by sigmonsays

5/1/2026 at 7:54:33 PM

The way so many people on HN and elsewhere don't value art at all is pretty depressing. I don't know if it's a side effect of lack of exposure to art and the humanities growing up or something else, but I can't imagine living that way. What a dull experience life would be without art.

by pesus

5/1/2026 at 7:56:21 PM

It's equally interesting to hear people talk about "what a dull experience life would be without art" because sometimes people want low brow entertainment, some of the time, as it's not like they're wholly rejecting human made art altogether. Sometimes I will laugh at a dumb AI generated video, it doesn't mean that's all I watch or experience.

by satvikpendem

5/2/2026 at 7:36:03 AM

HN is an interesting case, because a lot of those types of comments are likely to be either astroturfing, people who work at those companies, or people who are invested in them. I wouldn't extrapolate too much to the rest of humanity based on the people here.

by maplethorpe

5/3/2026 at 3:13:26 PM

You might overthink this as well, reality is most people just want to type `XXXX mix` and they just want to have this playing for 1h with nice backgrounds and call it a day, I doubt most actually care if it's AI or not. They might care only if you tell them. I hope I'm wrong.

There is also the genuine interest in a group to play AI tracks out of curiosity which is entertaining on its own as well, especially for the ones unaware of what it can produce (particularly since 2026).

by pixel_popping

5/1/2026 at 8:15:25 PM

I actually agree with you but I consider most modern music to already be artificially created. It’s not a computer but rather coming from industry chosen artists, corporate publishing, corporate marketing, and so on. Each step removing any beauty or controversy.

by bilsbie

5/1/2026 at 8:25:39 PM

you can easily pull up contemporary indie bands with 5000 listeners on spotify, you can also easily pull up non-modern music too. if you want something definitely non-corporate, they have Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music.

by mh2266

5/1/2026 at 7:44:11 PM

My take is that music _can be_ an art but it can also be other things, the same way sequential photos played back quickly can be an art but can also be a screensaver.

(I say this as a musician if that gets me extra cred somehow.)

by niek_pas

5/1/2026 at 8:45:27 PM

most music, movies, "drawings" etc are art, and are trash. all these "art with soul" and "soulless trash ai" from people who don't even believe in soul are getting tiresome.

Please, listen to the music you think is soulful and leave rest of us out of your luddites. Nobody is asking to ban arts by humans.

by CrimsonRain

5/1/2026 at 7:34:07 PM

Plenty of people use music as a fidget toy while working or studying. Not everything has to be a masterpiece.

by post-it

5/1/2026 at 7:52:43 PM

I think that attitude has downstream effects that are spiritually unhealthy. You should feel off-put by the idea of mentally sating your human brain with a soulless, algorithmically optimized imitation of art. We evolved with art as a species. I don't think anyone should be trying to "logic" their way into thinking humans are optional in art, even if it's something you're passively consuming.

by hbn

5/1/2026 at 7:57:59 PM

If your brain can't tell the difference, then...what's the difference? In other words I can like human made art but it doesn't mean I won't sometimes want to see other imitations of it, especially if they're interesting.

by satvikpendem

5/1/2026 at 7:44:47 PM

There's more quality ambient music out there recorded by actual humans than you can listen to in a lifetime already.

by gynecologist

5/1/2026 at 7:56:28 PM

Not always quite enough.

I've seen a few people discuss a desire for custom "Muzak", AI generated to fulfill a need. Upload your gym workout, and have it generate tracks to match each exercise -- right genre, BPM, type of track, right times of intensity and cooldown.

Of course you can do this with human made music in theory, but it'd be very hard to find the right tracks to match and you'd probably struggle with variety.

by dale_glass

5/1/2026 at 7:48:15 PM

Yeah. It’s not like there’s a dearth of human-created music.

by Sharlin

5/1/2026 at 7:54:40 PM

It's like junk food, sometimes I want trash, especially trash that can be highly specifically tuned to my particular taste or mood that day, e.g. a mashup of X and Y genres with Z influence, as Suno does. Humans cannot make specific music like that because we are finite in time and effort.

by satvikpendem

5/1/2026 at 9:30:43 PM

no trashfood is attractive due to the economics of it.

if really good tasting food was just as easy to come by and cheap, the demand for fastfood would decline massively.

by 4ffg

5/1/2026 at 7:45:47 PM

That's a bit gatekeepy IMO. Some music is art. Most music isn't. It also depends what you want from music. There's a difference between relaxing while listening to great songs and "background" music for work. I can't listen to lyrics while writing / coding / working in general, so I prefer simple repetitive or predictable genres. EDM / trance / techno / lofi depending on what I'm working on. We can agree that doesn't have to be art to be useful.

> allowing a computer to regurgitate previous works

That's not what "AI" music is, and you really should read into how it works before regurgitating (heh) miss-conceptions.

by NitpickLawyer

5/2/2026 at 2:49:44 AM

the slop existed before AI and in every era (from the beatles to britney spears), and for some people, it's all they need. why demonize AI-generated music?

by kome

5/1/2026 at 7:16:35 PM

It's called youtube.

by raincole

5/1/2026 at 9:20:41 PM

Is there a global config to exclude all non-human generated contents in Spotify?

by jameson

5/1/2026 at 7:33:22 PM

Do you have to pay for the verified badge? How much more rev do they get?

by boringg

5/1/2026 at 8:09:03 PM

On an off note, I do not get why moral puritans disparage the general public for listening to AI songs?

If they are "soulless" then they should close their ears rather than trying to maim others.

by threepts

5/1/2026 at 8:24:27 PM

>then they should close their ears rather than trying to maim others

criticism isn't maiming anyone. I don't know about you but I was taught that debating culture is part of a living society. A lot of people think that the human centipede dopamine machine that is "AI art" is a disaster for us and instead of acting like the three monkeys as mature adults we can critique this

the idea that we should "close our ears" is of course itself the very appeal of AI content, it never challenges or complains, that's the appeal of AI music, AI boyfriends and so on.

by Barrin92

5/1/2026 at 8:33:55 PM

Criticism is healthy and != maiming, but it is apparent that mainstream culture nowadays labels "AI Art" consumers as dumb and tasteless. I think this is maiming.

>"the idea that we should "close our ears" is of course itself the very appeal of AI content, it never challenges or complains, that's the appeal of AI music, AI boyfriends and so on." -> People also do shrooms that arguably have a similar effect, who am I to judge?

by threepts

5/1/2026 at 8:50:04 PM

It is dumb and tasteless and nobody's being maimed for pointing that out, it's DFW's Infinite Jest made real. The psychedelics and shrooms analogy is very appropriate, because it gave us a generation of escapist idiots who fried their brains and retreated into their own fantasies. Instead of going out, producing, debating and collectively making art.

Who are you not to judge? It should be judged, it's narcissistic and solipsistic. if the AI psychosis is comparable to the 60s and 70s at least there's hope it'll exhaust itself as quickly.

by Barrin92

5/1/2026 at 8:58:05 PM

Do not agree with what you say at all. some people are usually afraid of going out because people like you label them narcissistic and solipsistic so they stick to LLMs.

by threepts

5/2/2026 at 4:54:52 AM

"I do X because people judge me for doing X" is always a stupid argument.

by Dylan16807

5/1/2026 at 8:20:59 PM

They are soulless because often they are AI covers of existing songs trying to mimic the original artist so that they get substituted in as replacements for the original with limited realization on the part of the average listener.

Which of course that means the AI covers get the listens and the associated revenue instead of the original artist.

So instead of listening to "System of a Down", you get a cover from the AI artist "System of the Down" and now that you listened to that cover you start getting more covers in your recommended from them and eventually you are getting covers from them instead of from the real band since you started listening to them instead.

And even if it's not that extreme, the listener is getting served these knock off covers with no actual person behind them. If the listeners don't realise that's what's happening it will reflect poorly on the original creator and hurt their listenership (which wouldn't be impacted if shitty AI covers weren't being subbed in).

It even gets to the point that now you have artists who have upcoming albums and AI cover artist bots scrape the song list and upload auto generated "covers" of the unreleased original song to try and capture listens that would go to the original artist while people go to pull their music up prior to, on, and after release day of their new album.

Overwhelmingly AI songs on Spotify are autogenerated slop from bots trying to leech off of actual artists by creating a shitty knock off to skim some cash out of those artists' paycheck. (This is distinct from actual cover artists who at least contribute their own unique human touch to the covers).

If you want to make music and you happen to use AI in the process then whatever but Spotify has a major AI cover/clone problem.

by OneDeuxTriSeiGo

5/1/2026 at 8:26:30 PM

"soulless" is a term YOU label people with for enjoying a certain type of music. This is your problem, not the people's problem for enjoying this sort of music.

But I agree with your second point, an AI should NOT BE able to mimic a brand/personality such that it brings harm to them.

Your third point, actually it is NOT distinct from actual cover artists, because if I tomorrow pick a system of the down hum and then remix it and it gets popular, their automated DRM system will probably C&D me and their label sue me to oblivion using the same AI.

by threepts

5/1/2026 at 8:57:59 PM

> system of the down

System of a Down

> then remix it and it gets popular, their automated DRM system will probably C&D me and their label sue me to oblivion using the same AI.

Yes it will because remixing is not a cover. Remixing is a derivative work of the recording and therefore is subject to the terms of the mechanical license on the recording itself. The copyright on a recording is legally distinct from the copyright on the composition (the melody and lyrics).

You are protected under a provision of the Copyright Act of 1909 to modify and perform your own renditions of the original composition (provided it has been recorded previously). Provided you supply some level of original creative input and don't use the recording in your work, the original rights holder are required to provide you at no cost what is called a "mechanical license" for your cover granting you the right to distribute and sell the recording of your copyright.

In the past, granting of mechanical licenses was between parties (i.e. IP holder reaches out when they discover you made a cover and they grant you a license or you go to court and the court grants you the license. But as of 2021 a non profit body was formed under the guidance of the federal government to handle the blanket granting of mechanical licenses to any and all human covers (provided they did not use the original recording in their work).

If you sample the original work at all then you are now creating a derivative work of the recording and you must negotiate for a mechanical license (which is not required to be free). Likewise if you remix it.

by OneDeuxTriSeiGo

5/1/2026 at 8:14:53 PM

The models that make AI songs were trained on real musicians' copyrighted works, without permission.

It's kinda shitty to steal someone's works, then use them to build a machine to also steal their jobs.

by bjt

5/1/2026 at 9:14:22 PM

Is copyright infringement stealing? Is this even copyright infringement? These philosophical questions come up often. I'm not sure I know the answers.

by qingcharles

5/1/2026 at 8:19:15 PM

Bruno Mars started as an Elvis Presley impersonator (likely without his permission as he was dead at that time), can we say he stole his job?

People take ideas from other people all the time, my view is if machines do it, it isn't much of a different thing.

by threepts

5/2/2026 at 12:08:14 AM

People have been killing people for ages, so nukes for everyone!

by avaer

5/1/2026 at 8:59:27 PM

AI nutters always use this argument that bots are merely doing what people are doing: "a person learning from 100 books is just the same as an LLM learning from 100 million books".

If you own an apple tree, and (as is common in some countries) a child leans over your fence to grab an apple, you don't lose sleepless nights over it. But if a corporation comes over and leans over with its 10 meter long robotic arm and takes all your apples then it's a disaster.

Scale matters. People don't care for small "losses" because we want other people to prosper. But AI steals from everyone and brings prosperity only to Amodei and Altman.

by xdennis

5/1/2026 at 9:28:48 PM

Knowledge is not an apple tree, my machine can read all the 100 million books and those 100 million books still remain there.

You act like it's an zero sum game, it is not.

by threepts

5/1/2026 at 8:12:12 PM

because no one wants to be forced to listen to the slop? some reason spotify is allowing them to dump a lot of ai "music" and then they get played without you knowing

by emkoemko

5/1/2026 at 8:15:01 PM

No one is forcing you to listen to Spotify. You are free to buy a turntable and play all the non-sloppy music.

Seeing the popularity of some AI songs, people DO want to hear to this sort of music.

by threepts

5/1/2026 at 8:17:45 PM

i pay to listen to music now i have to not use discovery mode because spotify wants to earn more money by pushing ai slop to its listeners to not have to pay real artists

by emkoemko

5/1/2026 at 8:27:02 PM

> because spotify wants to earn more money by pushing ai slop to its listeners

If people listen to AI songs, how does Spotify get a bigger cut, as you seem to be suggesting [1]? Or are you suggesting that Spotify is generating/has rights to this music?

[1] https://artists.spotify.com/royalties-guide

by nomel

5/1/2026 at 8:22:16 PM

AI slop is quite antithetical to Spotify's business model, they would actually lose money if say tomorrow, AI music dominates the charts, when AI music gets that good, people can just generate their own music and leave Spotify back in the mud.

It's probably the "AI artists" themselves generating false engagement and manipulating the algo for discovery.

by threepts

5/1/2026 at 7:24:59 PM

how are people getting this AI music on Spotify? where are you finding it? for example the home recommendations for me today are The Beths, Big Thief, Geese, and Sleater-Kinney. and it is all albums I have already have listened to, but fine, whatever, that's just bad recommendations, not AI.

generally I use either the search box, which is always going to return the Geese album and not AI slop if I type "Getting Killed", or the library view on the left side, I don't think I've never seen an AI album on Spotify, where are you getting them?

by mh2266

5/1/2026 at 8:06:38 PM

Not on Spotify but on YouTube music. Got recommend some AI music. I often don’t actively search for music but go where the algorithms tell me to go (works good for me. Not for everybody. Ends up listing mostly to very small artists).

by victorbjorklund

5/1/2026 at 7:32:30 PM

For me, before I canceled, about 20% of the weekly "Release radar" list was obvious AI slop, with zero indication that it was happening and no way to opt out.

It probably depends on which discovery channel you're using and whether the recommendation algorithm has you pegged as someone willing to try new / less popular bands. But it's definitely an issue on the platform. I never sought AI content and always diligently downvoted it, and it would still keep showing up.

by chromacity

5/1/2026 at 7:52:28 PM

yeah I never use their recommendation playlists, other than the automatic ongoing playlist once an album ends. that generally plays one song by the same artist and then some similar artists which are all real people (annoyingly it tends to choose the same most popular songs for an artist it chooses every single time)

I just find music on sites like p4k, opening bands at shows, or the "similar artists" feature on Spotify which always suggests real people for me, they have convincing photos and often upcoming shows listed so probably not an AI bot

by mh2266

5/1/2026 at 7:59:50 PM

Usually on the discover weekly playlists. It started with hip hop jazz remakes about a year ago, presumably as I like hip hop, have engaged with genuine hip hop jazz covers before and these were going viral at the time.

I hate to think what else might have surfaced on these generated playlists (which for me are the #1 selling point and reason I have stayed with Spotify), that I haven't noticed yet is AI.

by deanc

5/1/2026 at 7:32:41 PM

put the onus on the people, of course. how about make AI music come with a warning label?

by milesward

5/1/2026 at 7:34:27 PM

I would have expected a "un-verified" batch, this way they're giving AI "artists" legitimacy.

by barbazoo

5/1/2026 at 8:27:49 PM

I'm sick and tired of everyone letting their political views govern everything they think.

Best new artist since the pandemic is AI Iran. I don't necessarily agree with their message, but the songs are good!

Take this song, it's just good hip hop no matter how you spin it: https://youtu.be/i0u_BNPOsMw?si=IQ49AkUM-4tFTqKX

by amarant

5/1/2026 at 8:21:51 PM

I added two songs from an AI artist to my Liked Songs back when all this started. Now I've removed them and have spent the last 14 months trying to convince Spotify that I'm not interested in this artist. Meanwhile they keep plastering every new single this slop generator pumps out onto the front of my homescreen. Sometimes it's multiple releases per week. Absolutely infuriating.

by FrontierProject

5/1/2026 at 8:22:38 PM

I wish they would add this for Podcasts. I sometimes search for interviews with a certain person and some subject areas are now inundated with AI slop that is convincing enough I can get a couple minutes into it before I’ve realized I’m not listening to humans. I’m sure I’ll develop better intuitions but I sure wish I didn’t have to.

by jeremyjh

5/1/2026 at 6:47:51 PM

It's only a matter of time until streaming succumbs to slop, much like social media has. If it allows Spotify to reduce royalty payouts and attrition doesn't meaningfully increase, they'll keep supporting it. Meanwhile, real artists suffer and the rich get richer.

by cdrnsf

5/1/2026 at 7:53:11 PM

Right call

by omiliyomami

5/2/2026 at 12:38:21 AM

rutracker > spotify

by ghstinda

5/1/2026 at 7:00:56 PM

Great, now add the ability for me to have any non-Verified artists become completely invisible to me in the application.

by RankingMember

5/1/2026 at 7:54:52 PM

[dead]

by pwr1