Or just don’t use Spotify
Hell yeah
Spotify? the company that ran ICE ads?
Picked up a dedicated audio device recently (with another few on the way!), and it feels nice to curate my own offline, add-free, algorithm-free listening experience. Having music myself his been half the fun of this, I won’t be using any streaming app going forward.
It is also super adorable:
How do you discover new artists? That is the main thing keeping me from doing this.
KEXP, Audiotree, Tiny Desk and more
Plus the bands that open for the bands I like. Even if I don’t go to the concert, I look up who’s opening it.
Thanks. I looked at a few of these. I think I have seen tiny desk before a long time ago. And I already found a new thing I like :)
I’ve never really thought about looking up the openers for concerts that I don’t go to. Great idea.
Wtf?? They made tons of the AI slop on their themselves!
The two things are not in contradiction. Identifying human-generated content is essential to AI too. if you feed AI slop back to AI, their output deteriorates quickly. Not saying that it’s the primary purpose of this new feature, but this is making it easier for AI to find human-generated music to train on.
So what happens if the artist is dead?
Freddie Mercury would find it difficult to maintain an active social nedia presence to prove he’s human, being rather indisposed at the present.
And in dark mmo world, soon there will be service to buy “Verified by Spotify” badge or account.
Spotify is such a shit company. I used to get paid (peanuts) on my artist account but they raised the threshold for getting payouts so now I get nothing.
Take your music down
Too little too late
And with Artist Profile Protection (currently in beta), artists now have greater control over what appears on their profile, which helps to ensure the music you see is coming from them.
From the Artist Profile Protection link:
Music has been landing on the wrong artist pages across streaming services, and the rise of easy-to-produce AI tracks has made the problem worse. That’s not the experience we want artists to have on Spotify, and that’s why we’ve made protecting artist identity a top priority for 2026. Today, we’re announcing a first-of-its-kind solution to a problem that’s affected streaming for years.
How the hell is that something that is only in beta in 2026 and not a standard feature? It’s currently optional, but they better automatically opt in verified “No AI” artists if the label is going to be worth anything. There should not be AI-generated songs from randos getting attached to a “No AI” artist.
Where’s my “No Autotune” label?
I’ll never understand Spotify. If it’s such a pain in the ass why do people use it? Napster was big when I was in high school so if I find a song I like, I go download it. Sometimes it’s piracy. Sometimes it’s a legitimate purchase. Whichever is easiest.
Done. The end. It’s mine forever.
As far as discoverability goes it helps that there have been no new music releases in the past couple of decades that I care about.
In the same breath that Spotify uses to introduce Ai stuff they also introduce a prompt based Ai to create playlists. I wish there were more platforms with feature parity and that it were easier to transfer preferences and genre tastes to other platforms.
I’ve tried deezer briefly but it is just missing so many things that I like that Spotify has.
Yet another platform with meaningless badges
