Spotify to Label AI Artists, Block Them from Recommendations

Starting September, Spotify will label AI-generated artists as "AI personas" and exclude them from algorithmic recommendations, drawing a firm line between human creators and machine-made music.

Spotify is drawing a firm line between human musicians and their machine-made counterparts. Starting in September, the streaming giant will introduce a new "AI persona" label for artist profiles and track listings created by artificial intelligence — and, critically, will block those artists from appearing in algorithmic recommendations by default.

The move comes after a year of mounting pressure from the music industry. The Velvet Sundown, an AI-generated band that racked up over a million Spotify plays in 2025, became the poster child for a problem that has only grown: fake artists siphoning streaming royalties away from real performers. Earlier cases like Sienna Rose — a singer with nearly 3 million monthly listeners who turned out to have no verifiable human existence — further underscored the scale of the issue.

Spotify had already begun laying groundwork. In May, it added a "Verified by Spotify" green checkmark to confirm an artist's authenticity. The platform also began asking creators to disclose whether their work was AI-generated. The new label goes further, making AI-generated content visible to listeners and removing it from the recommendation engine that drives most discovery on the platform.

The "AI persona" tag will appear on both the artist profile page and on individual track listings within playlists. Users can still choose to listen to AI-generated music, but the algorithm will no longer push it alongside human-made tracks unless a user explicitly opts in. The policy applies from September and represents one of the most concrete steps any major streaming platform has taken to separate AI output from human artistry.

Sources: The Guardian, Tech Digest