Spotify has become a dumping ground for AI-generated music, and the platform's refusal to label these tracks is forcing ordinary users to step in with homemade detection tools. While competitors like YouTube and Deezer have implemented AI labeling systems, Spotify remains silent, creating a Wild West where AI artists can masquerade as humans, copy real musicians' work, and siphon streaming revenue from legitimate creators.

Why Is Spotify's Silence on AI Music Such a Problem?

The issue came into sharp focus with the case of Slime Dot, an R&B artist from Las Vegas with over 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. In May, Slime Dot denied being an AI artist in a GQ interview, claiming "the truth doesn't matter these days." GQ initially published the piece as a debunking of AI rumors, but later added a note acknowledging that Slime Dot was indeed an AI avatar, while still insisting "the talent behind the music remains undeniable." This confusion could have been entirely avoided if Spotify simply flagged AI-generated music the way YouTube already does.

The stakes extend far beyond embarrassing mix-ups. Scammers have used Spotify to publish AI-generated music under the names of real, dead musicians in apparent attempts to siphon money from their popularity. Living artists have reported the same thing happening to them. In one documented case, a popular Spotify artist was publishing hours of Iranian jazz every week under the name Qajar Jazz, which gained 29,579 monthly listeners and benefited from geopolitical interest following the U.S. conflict with Iran. YouTube labeled the videos as AI-generated in fine print, but many viewers still believed they were listening to real musicians.

How Are Users Fighting Back Against AI Music Flooding?

Since Spotify won't act, volunteers have created their own solutions. Graeme Fulton built SoullessMusic.com, a database for "AI artists hiding on Spotify. No bands, no studios, no soul, just machines and melody." The site uses a combination of open-source AI detection models, metadata analysis, and manual review to identify suspicious tracks. When Fulton analyzed Slime Dot's track "Fully," SlopTracker, another user-built tool, found it was 95 percent likely to be AI-generated by Suno, one of the leading AI music generators.

Fulton explained his motivation for building the database: "I didn't know what's AI and what's not. And then I'm on Instagram Reels and I see loads of artists unhappy saying some artist has popped up with their song and just copied it. And there's loads of different cases where they [AI artists] would copy an artist's look and appearance, sort of just stealing from artists".

Fulton

"I didn't know what's AI and what's not. And then I'm on Instagram Reels and I see loads of artists unhappy saying some artist has popped up with their song and just copied it," said Graeme Fulton.

Graeme Fulton, Creator of SoullessMusic

Both SoullessMusic and SlopTracker rely on AI detection tools to identify AI music, which creates an ironic problem: using AI to detect AI is inherently flawed and can produce false positives. Fulton acknowledged this limitation, noting "it's not ideal when that happens, but it's going to happen because it's still quite tricky to check what's AI and what's not".

Fulton

How Much Money Are AI Artists Actually Making on Spotify?

The financial impact is staggering. Based on publicly available streaming data, SoullessMusic estimates that the small number of AI artists tracked on its database generate approximately $5.7 million annually. The most popular AI artist, mikeeysmind, alone generates an estimated $1.5 million per year. SlopTracker, which tracks AI-generated music featured on official Spotify-curated playlists, calculated that these artists are "draining" $0.1188 per second from real musicians who could be making that money instead.

To put this in perspective, Deezer, a Spotify competitor, reported in April that 44 percent of all new music uploaded to its platform is now AI-generated. That's nearly half of all new submissions. Spotify has announced plans to add AI disclosures to AI-generated music, but after reviewing dozens of tracks for this story, those disclosures remain largely absent from the platform.

What Tools Can Help You Identify AI Music on Spotify?

• SoullessMusic.com: A crowdsourced database that catalogs suspected AI artists on Spotify, using open-source detection models, metadata analysis, and manual human review to identify tracks with high confidence levels.
• SlopTracker: An online tool that lets users upload files or paste Spotify links to run tracks through AI detection algorithms, which return confidence percentages for whether a song was generated by Suno or other AI music tools.
• Metadata Scanning: Both tools search track metadata for tags that might tie music back to specific AI music generators like Suno or Udio, which include inaudible digital watermarking in their generated tracks.

Suno and Udio both include inaudible digital watermarking in their generated music, which in theory could make it trivial for Spotify to tag these tracks automatically. The fact that Spotify hasn't implemented this suggests either a lack of technical capability or a deliberate choice not to alienate AI music creators who contribute to its catalog.

What's Happening in the Broader AI Music Legal Landscape?

Suno's position became more precarious this week when Have I Been Pwned reported that a November 2025 breach had exposed 55.3 million unique email addresses associated with the company. The stolen data included names, phone numbers, physical addresses, purchase records, and in some cases partial payment-card details. More damaging still, the leaked material included Suno source code that allegedly showed the company scraping music and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius for model training.

The timing could hardly be worse. On July 20, a federal judge gave final approval to Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with authors and publishers, the largest copyright class-action settlement in U.S. history. Judge William Alsup ruled that using books to train AI models qualified as fair use, but downloading pirated copies and retaining them in a permanent central library did not. If plaintiffs in the record-label lawsuits against Suno and Udio can authenticate the leaked source code and persuade the court to admit it as evidence, it could become significant proof of how Suno acquired its training data, potentially undermining any fair-use defense.

Meanwhile, the music industry is moving forward with standardized AI labeling. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Association of Independent Music (A2IM), Worldwide Independent Network (WIN), International Association of Independent Record Labels (IMPALA), The Grammys, Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), and the Human Artistry Campaign announced a joint standard distinguishing "AI-Generated" tracks, which are primarily made with AI, from "AI-Assisted" tracks, which deploy AI for some elements. The organizations are now seeking adoption by streaming services, distributors, and aggregators.

Spotify's continued silence on AI music labeling stands in stark contrast to these industry-wide efforts. The platform's inaction has created a vacuum that volunteers like Graeme Fulton are filling, one manually reviewed track at a time. Until Spotify acts, users who want to know whether they're listening to a real artist or an algorithm will have to rely on crowdsourced databases and third-party detection tools.