Artists have long criticized Spotify for its meager royalties system and its questionable content moderation practices. Now artists must contend with an entirely different problem: increased competition from AI-generated tracks, some of which have gained hundreds of thousands of listens.

“There are multiple reports of [AI-generated music] being recommended to people, sometimes even hundreds of thousands of plays, or more,” says Ed Newton-Rex, former vice president of audio at Stability AI, who left the company in November 2023 over concerns about its approach to copyright. Newton-Rex is now CEO of Fairly Trained, a nonprofit that certifies artificial intelligence companies for fairer training data sourcing.

Among those alleged AI-generated bands—believed to be inhuman in part because they appear not to have any other online presence outside Spotify—is Jet Fuel & Ginger Ales. The band has earned the “Verified Artist” badge on Spotify and boasts 414,500 monthly listeners for its covers of The La’s and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Yet Redditors are convinced that the band is AI-generated.

It’s not the only band believed to be AI-powered. Groups like Awake Past 3 and Gutter Grinders have hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners on the app, and often share some suspicious traits: the uncanny valley vocals, the plain-Jane branding of their logo, and a dearth of biographical information.

One singer, Sofia Pitcher, managed to rack up huge streaming numbers between December 2023 and March 2024 for tracks like “Stone Age” and “Rock,” both of which came from her album, Stone Age. But Pitcher didn’t exist, according to an investigation by Spanish news outlet El Diario.

Spotify did not provide answers to a request for comment by the deadline provided, which included clarifying whether Pitcher, Jet Fuel & Ginger Ales, and Awake Past 3 are, in fact, AI-generated musicians. (Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said in a rare BBC interview in September 2023 that the app has no plans to ban AI music.)

A Spotify spokesperson did say that the streaming giant “does not have a policy against artists creating content using autotune or AI tools, as long as the content does not violate our other policies, including our deceptive content policy, which prohibits impersonation.” The company has in the past taken action against alleged AI-generated artists (Pitcher’s tracks are no longer streamable). The Spotify spokesperson did not provide data to Fast Company on how many AI artists are on the platform, or their impact on streams.

While AI is the common culprit here, the issue is one that has blighted Spotify even in a pre-AI era. Stockholm-based musician Johan Röhr has been dubbed “the most famous musician you’ve never heard of” by the media, because he recognized the ability to upload tracks under pseudonyms and bank the profits from the various accounts. While the average stream reportedly pays between $0.003 and $0.004, compounding those streams across a number of different artist names and genres can soon make small pittances add up. Röhr’s 650 different noms de plume have been collectively streamed 15 billion times, according to The Guardian, with analysts suggesting he made $3 million on the platform in 2022 alone.

“People have been creating albums and songs on Spotify which are just over that 30-second limit to trigger payments for ages,” says Kieron Donoghue, founder of Playlist Alert and Humble Angel Records. But while Röhr’s music is original, others have not been as inventive in their output. “There’s always been that kind of thing: white-noise generators, or relaxing piano sounds, all that sort of stuff. And Spotify has spotted it where it’s been relevant and stopped it.”

Donoghue retains a generally optimistic outlook on the uptick of AI songs on Spotify. “It’s just a case of some people trying to make a fast buck, like they’ve always done on Spotify and always will,” he says. “ I don’t see it as a threat as it stands now to anyone’s livelihoods.”

But Newton-Rex, the Fairly Trained CEO, sings a different tune. “It’s clear this is going to eat into the royalties and the revenue streams paid to real human musicians,” he says, additionally noting his concern that the AI apps used to create this kind of content are exploiting the work of real human artists by repurposing their music as training data—without compensation. Newton-Rex calls it “essentially copyright laundering.”

“Spotify just straight up shouldn’t allow music on the platform that is using models where there’s serious concern that [they are] trained on other musicians’ work without permission,” Newton-Rex argues. For AI music that is allowed, he says, “they should label it so that people can make a choice as to whether they listen to it. . . . And I think [Spotify] probably shouldn’t be recommending it.”