Singer and producer Grimes and rapper A$AP Rocky have described different roles for artificial intelligence in making music, as Spotify changes how it recommends tracks it labels slop and spam.
Grimes told Interview magazine that DeepSeek wrote some lyrics for a song on Psy Opera. Her account describes AI contributing to the writing of part of a song; it does not describe a wholly AI-generated recording.
Rocky told Complex that he prefers making music with musicians and producers. He also described AI as useful for separating vocals from a recording, a task distinct from generating a complete song.
Spotify’s decision to exclude unwanted tracks from recommendations concerns how music reaches listeners. In an Oct. 20 statement, the company said it had excluded more than 50 million tracks it identified as slop and spam from recommendations in 2026. It did not say how many of those tracks were AI-generated.
Excluding a track from recommendations differs from taking it off the service. Spotify separately cited more than 75 million removals for serious or repeated rule violations, without assigning that total to 2026 in its latest statement.
Spotify said it revised its recommendations over six months after studying how listeners responded to suggested tracks. It reported a decline in concerns about those suggestions and acknowledged limits in detecting AI-generated music.
The company said tracks it judged highly likely to be AI-generated were 10 times as likely as other tracks to fall short of its recorded-royalty threshold. Under a rule in place since 2024, a track needs 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months to generate recorded royalties. Spotify says the rule is intended to limit the diversion of royalties through mass uploads.
Spotify plans to make Artist Profile Protection available to all artists by the end of 2026. The tool, now in beta, lets artists review releases delivered under their names.
