Spotify to crack down on AI impersonation of musicians and spammy tracks

Spotify has announced a series of measures it will implement in order to prevent bad actors from misusing Generative AI to impersonate artistes and/or steal their royalties.

In a blog post on Thursday (September 25, 2025), Spotify explained it was strengthening AI protections for artists, songwriters, and producers in the face of recent advances in Gen AI technologies.

The measures that the streaming giant will adopt are the improved enforcement of impersonation violations, a new spam filtering system, and AI disclosures for music with industry-standard credits.

Spotify noted that it will tackle the use of AI voice cloning done by bad actors to impersonate existing artists, as well as deliveries of fake tracks to their profiles.

“On our end, we’ll also be investing more resources into our content mismatch process, reducing the wait time for review, and enabling artists to report “mismatch” even in the pre-release state,” said Spotify.

While the company does not penalise artists who use Gen AI technologies to make music, Spotify said it will use spam filters to stop bad actors who are responsible for mass uploads, duplicates, SEO hacks, artificially short track abuse, and other kinds of “slop” or poor-quality content. This is a strategy to stop bad actors from stealing the royalties that rightfully belong to the genuine artistes.

Finally, Spotify confirmed that it will enable AI disclosures for music credits, allowing musicians to be more transparent about AI use in their work while listeners can choose music that better aligns with their preferences.

This credit system is to be developed through the standards setting organisation DDEX. However, Spotify stressed that the AI disclosures would not lead to artistes being punished or their tracks down-ranked for revealing their processes.

“At its best, AI is unlocking incredible new ways for artists to create music and for listeners to discover it. At its worst, AI can be used by bad actors and content farms to confuse or deceive listeners, push “slop” into the ecosystem, and interfere with authentic artists working to build their careers. That kind of harmful AI content degrades the user experience for listeners and often attempts to divert royalties to bad actors,” said Spotify in the blog post.