The songs are still on the platform, but listeners now have to search for them, and more than 300,000 artists are verified.
Spotify has removed more than 50 million songs from its recommendations, the company said on Tuesday, October 20, in a post on its "For the Record" blog. The tracks have not been deleted. They are still on the platform, but a listener would have to actively seek them out, because they are no longer recommended by algorithm or by editors.
Those 50 million songs come on top of more than 75 million tracks Spotify has removed from the service altogether. Billboard notes that Spotify gave the 75 million figure back in September 2025. Spotify said the removed releases had been flagged for "serious or repeated violations of our rules."
The cuts began with listener behaviour. "Earlier this year, we looked closely at the tracks listeners were skipping, ignoring, or telling us they didn't want to hear," the company said in the post. "A clear pattern emerged: these tracks were consistently ones identified as slop or spam." Spotify says it has since made "numerous updates to our recommendation system to remove slop and spam, and surface more music made by authentic, human artists." Its editors, it adds, "hold the same standard and don't program content identified as slop or spam."
The filtering draws on "listener engagement and feedback, upload patterns, metadata, and information from multiple third-party AI detection tools," according to Rolling Stone's account of Spotify's post.
Charlie Hellman, Spotify's head of music, set out the company's position at a press briefing in September 2025:
"We're not here to punish artists for using AI authentically and responsibly."
Spotify has also labelled "thousands" of profiles as AI Personas. Those profiles are kept out of recommendations unless a user follows them. Billboard reports the AI Persona badge was announced in August and rolled out in mid-September.
Spotify says more than 300,000 artists are now verified, and 70 percent of them are independent, according to Billboard. The verification badge tells listeners there is a "real, identifiable person" behind the music, Rolling Stone reports.
Other steps include Artist Profile Protection, a beta that lets artists review releases delivered under their name to avoid impersonation and stream-farming, Rolling Stone reports. Thousands of participants have already signed up. Spotify has also added a credits feature that lists AI contributions to a song, which can be seen in the app. Thousands of artists have opted into a programme that lets them screen which songs using their name appear on their profiles.
Spotify also revealed that AI-generated songs are ten times as likely not to meet the 1,000-stream threshold needed to earn royalties.
Other services are moving the same way. YouTube Music last week joined Apple Music and Tidal in labelling AI-powered tracks, Variety reports, and Tidal has promised not to allow monetisation of any AI-enabled song on its platform.
"This work isn't finished," the company added. Spotify also named the tactics it is watching: "mass uploads, duplicates, SEO manipulation, spammy playlist networks, and artificially short tracks."
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