Spotify says it has removed more than 50 million tracks identified as low-quality AI content or spam from its recommendations in 2026. The tracks remain available on the service, but Spotify no longer suggests them to listeners. This is separate from deleting music for breaking platform rules. In September 2025, the company reported that it had deleted more than 75 million spam tracks for serious or repeated violations.
During the past six months, Spotify has adjusted its recommendation system to promote more music by human artists. It examined tracks that listeners skipped, ignored or said they did not want to hear. These often matched content already identified as low-quality or spam. According to Spotify, complaints about this content appearing in recommendations have fallen since the changes.
To identify unwanted content, Spotify combines listener feedback with information about tracks, upload patterns and outside AI detection tools. However, it acknowledges that these tools have limits and that detection will become harder as AI improves. Thousands of virtual artists carry an AI Persona label, which identifies an artificial identity rather than a real person. Their music is excluded from recommendations by default. Spotify has also given verification badges to more than 300,000 human artists.
