{"id":409947,"date":"2026-01-16T02:08:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T02:08:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/409947\/"},"modified":"2026-01-16T02:08:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T02:08:13","slug":"spotify-is-seriously-playing-with-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/409947\/","title":{"rendered":"Spotify Is Seriously Playing With Fire"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the second I started paying to stream music, it was Spotify<\/a> for me. Not only was the ability to instantly stream songs mind-blowing for someone who\u2019d 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?<\/p>\n

That was a long time ago, though, and a lot has changed in the world of streaming<\/a>\u2014not 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\u2019s put it this way: Spotify subscriptions aren\u2019t getting any easier.<\/p>\n

Remember that \u201creasonable price\u201d 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<\/a> that it\u2019s bringing that $11.99 price to $12.99. Don\u2019t get me wrong; in the grand scheme of leech-like subscription hikes, it could be worse (looking at you, Netflix<\/a>), but that temperature is\u00a0rising, and it might be at the worst possible time.<\/p>\n

\"CarRemember Car Thing? Yeah, me neither. \u00a9Spotify <\/p>\n

As the price hikes come down, Spotify finds itself at the center of a separate discussion, and it\u2019s about everyone\u2019s favorite buzzword (or technically buzz phrase)\u2014AI slop. Like YouTube and some of our other favorite platforms, Spotify is at a crossroads with generative AI, and it hasn\u2019t exactly inserted itself in this discussion by choice. The short of it is: Spotify is playing host to AI-generated music, and customers aren\u2019t super happy about it. How unhappy? Well, just scan this Reddit thread<\/a> to get a sense.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, people don\u2019t 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<\/a> as an \u201cAI filmmaker,\u201d while Suno, a generative music platform, saw its CEO summarily declare that \u201cit\u2019s not enjoyable to make music now<\/a>\u201d last January. Whatever you say, bud.<\/p>\n

Spotify, for its part, hasn\u2019t taken much of a stance on the topic of AI-generated music on its platform. While the company has introduced new policies<\/a> 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<\/a>, Spotify seemed to waffle on the idea of what AI-generated music even is, stating that \u201cit\u2019s not always possible to draw a simple line between \u2018AI\u2019 and \u2018non-AI\u2019 music.\u201d<\/p>\n

And even if Spotify\u00a0did\u00a0want to take steps to flag or remove AI music on its platform, there\u2019s 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 \u201canonymous\u201d 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\u2019ll save you the rabbit hole, but Rolling Stone<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Spotify\u2019s lack of backbone on topics isn\u2019t 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<\/a>, for example, just announced that it will disallow music made \u201cwholly or in substantial part\u201d by AI.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also worth noting that competitors like Apple Music<\/a> don\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Combine the steady rise of Apple Music with price hikes and general dissatisfaction with Spotify\u2019s platform, and you\u2019ve got yourself a recipe for \u201cruh-roh,\u201d at least if your paycheck is reliant on selling Spotify subscriptions. What I\u2019m trying to say is that Spotify, more than ever, is treading into treacherous territory.<\/p>\n

While similar streaming services like Netflix or Hulu enjoy a relative degree of impunity for sudden hikes, I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

In value terms, Apple Music is breathing down Spotify\u2019s neck, which could make switching easier than ever. For the record, that\u2019s 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\u2019s reign has been, nothing in the tech world is set in stone; just ask Blackberry<\/a> or Skype<\/a>. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From the second I started paying to stream music, it was Spotify for me. Not only was the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":409948,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,943,11710,7382,74],"class_list":["post-409947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-audio","tag-spotify","tag-streaming","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409947\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/409948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}