Spotify Is Seriously Playing With Fire

From the second I started paying to stream music, it was Spotify for me. Not only was the ability to instantly stream songs mind-blowing for someone who’d spent years in the harrowing trenches of peer-to-peer music piracy, but Spotify was pretty much the only game in town. It was an easy choice: risk downloading a weapons-grade porn virus or pay a reasonable price for an on-demand, god-level catalog of instantly accessible music?

That was a long time ago, though, and a lot has changed in the world of streaming—not all of it for the better. While the choice to throw money at Spotify was a no-brainer back in the day, easy things have a bad habit of becoming hard, and let’s put it this way: Spotify subscriptions aren’t getting any easier.

Remember that “reasonable price” I mentioned? Yeah, well, for the first time since Spotify Premium launched for U.S. customers in 2011, that price has started to balloon. In 2023, subscription fees rose from $9.99 to $10.99, and again in 2024 from $10.99 to $11.99. Today, Spotify announced that it’s bringing that $11.99 price to $12.99. Don’t get me wrong; in the grand scheme of leech-like subscription hikes, it could be worse (looking at you, Netflix), but that temperature is rising, and it might be at the worst possible time.

Remember Car Thing? Yeah, me neither. ©Spotify

As the price hikes come down, Spotify finds itself at the center of a separate discussion, and it’s about everyone’s favorite buzzword (or technically buzz phrase)—AI slop. Like YouTube and some of our other favorite platforms, Spotify is at a crossroads with generative AI, and it hasn’t exactly inserted itself in this discussion by choice. The short of it is: Spotify is playing host to AI-generated music, and customers aren’t super happy about it. How unhappy? Well, just scan this Reddit thread to get a sense.

As it turns out, people don’t like AI slop being mixed in with their favorite art, which may be obvious for most regular people but seems to come as a surprise to the companies selling it. Google, for example, is marketing its Veo video generation model as an “AI filmmaker,” while Suno, a generative music platform, saw its CEO summarily declare that “it’s not enjoyable to make music now” last January. Whatever you say, bud.

Spotify, for its part, hasn’t taken much of a stance on the topic of AI-generated music on its platform. While the company has introduced new policies for AI music that impersonates artists or deepfakes them altogether, it has given no indication of an outright ban. In a recent statement to TechRadar, Spotify seemed to waffle on the idea of what AI-generated music even is, stating that “it’s not always possible to draw a simple line between ‘AI’ and ‘non-AI’ music.”

And even if Spotify did want to take steps to flag or remove AI music on its platform, there’s evidence that the company might not be able to identify which music to take down in the first place. Take the recent controversy surrounding the (most likely) AI artist Sienna Rose, for example. The self-described “anonymous” neo-soul singer has recently become the subject of speculation after being shouted out by the real flesh-and-blood pop artist Selena Gomez in an Instagram post. I’ll save you the rabbit hole, but Rolling Stone did a deep dive, and I think the case is pretty cut and dry: Sienna Rose is AI slop, and as of right now, she (or it) has 2.9 million listeners on Spotify. Gomez, for the record, has since removed her plug of the (probably) AI artist.

Spotify’s lack of backbone on topics isn’t surprising given the generally lax policies most platforms have had toward AI slop (mostly because the companies that own those platforms are the ones hawking said slop), but it does stand in stark contrast to competitors in the space. Bandcamp, for example, just announced that it will disallow music made “wholly or in substantial part” by AI.

It’s also worth noting that competitors like Apple Music don’t seem to share the same problem as Spotify, and that difference could be increasingly more important. As I mentioned before, things have changed over the past 15 years of Spotify’s rise in the U.S., and one of those things is the amount and influence of competitors. While Spotify is still far and away the biggest presence in the music streaming space, Apple Music has gained significant ground.

Combine the steady rise of Apple Music with price hikes and general dissatisfaction with Spotify’s platform, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for “ruh-roh,” at least if your paycheck is reliant on selling Spotify subscriptions. What I’m trying to say is that Spotify, more than ever, is treading into treacherous territory.

While similar streaming services like Netflix or Hulu enjoy a relative degree of impunity for sudden hikes, I’m not sure Spotify will get the same forgiveness. For one, Netflix and Hulu have exclusives, which keep customers locked in. Spotify? Not so much. The platform used to lock customers in by boasting the most complete catalog of music, but Apple Music has relative parity at this point, with both platforms boasting a repertoire of over 100 million songs.

In value terms, Apple Music is breathing down Spotify’s neck, which could make switching easier than ever. For the record, that’s great for consumers who might be fed up with AI slop or just want the best deal (Apple Music is only two dollars cheaper than Spotify, but still). And as long as Spotify’s reign has been, nothing in the tech world is set in stone; just ask Blackberry or Skype. It’s safe to say that, more than ever, Spotify is playing with fire. It just so happens that, this time, that fire is starting to smell an awful lot like AI slop.