r/Music • u/Kaiser_Allen • Jun 28 '25

music "There's not a shred of evidence on the internet that this band has ever existed": This apparently AI-generated artist is racking up hundreds of thousands of Spotify streams

https://www.musicradar.com/music-tech/theres-not-a-shred-of-evidence-on-the-internet-that-this-band-has-ever-existed-this-apparently-ai-generated-artist-is-racking-up-hundreds-of-thousands-of-spotify-streams
7.8k Upvotes

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1.8k

u/questionname Jun 28 '25

I mean, how many of the 350,000 listener are AI or bots?

825

u/[deleted] Jun 28 '25

I’m surprised this isn’t being mentioned more it’s very likely a high percentage is bots. Of course there’s probably a few actual people listening to them but not many

341

u/AadeeMoien Jun 28 '25

The article mentions it's being thrown into generated playlists, that definitely helps inflate numbers.

149

u/ummnothankyou_ Jun 28 '25

Eh it's not like it's a recent conspiracy that Spotify themselves have AI-generated artists and musics in their generated playlists, mainly in like instrumental songs, but still.

48

u/8spawn Jun 28 '25

There are a lot in reggae playlists and daily mixes as well. 😢

Been with Spotify from the beginning, have a family/premium account (with a bunch of my kids on it) and am about to kill it altogether if they didn't give us an AI filter sooner-rather-than-later.

21

u/Sadtireddumb Jun 29 '25

100% with you. I’ve been using Spotify for 10+ years. This is dumb.

7

u/video_dhara Jun 29 '25

Yes the reggae thing totally bugged me out. Was in a semi-k-hole at 2 in the morning and I didn’t even realize I was listening to reggae until it started to break into a million pieces. Broke my brain for a minute, as it was relatively early in the current AI trajectory, and I was rather high so it was hard to understand what sounds and thoughts were “real”. I felt like I was being experimented on. Honestly it wasn’t until this post that I had any confirmation, people thought I was making it up. 

3

u/SirGaylordSteambath Jun 29 '25

Filtering ai is engaging in an arms race that they can’t win.

3

u/LordBiscuits Jun 29 '25

Perhaps

But an attempt would be nice

-1

u/SirGaylordSteambath Jun 29 '25

Not perhaps, yes.

Why would they attempt something destined to fail from the get go?

3

u/ak_sys Jun 29 '25

Wait... do you all pay for Spotify just to let it shuffle random songs?

I thought everyone was like me and made their own playlists or sometimes just makes a queue on the fly. I knew they used AI in playlists, but I never knew it was that bad.

The other side of that, if i let youtube autoplay, itll only be so long before it feeds me slop, and Spotify is no different.

Maybe you can try curating your own playlists, and see if that helps?

1

u/volmeistro Jun 29 '25

Yeah the bots plant the seed for the Spotify algorithm and then Spotify sees how "popular" it is and starts throwing it out to more people as recommendations on playlists

122

u/mithroll Jun 28 '25

So, basically we have AI generating music for AI to listen to?

107

u/disisathrowaway Jun 28 '25

Kind of like AI generated resumes being read and rejected by AI HR teams.

5

u/JohnnyButtocks Jun 29 '25

Or the entirety of Facebook’s activity. Bots making fake pictures, to be liked by an army of bots.

53

u/Journeyman42 Jun 28 '25

It's AI turtles all the way down

2

u/SharrkBoy Jun 28 '25

And someone somehow making money from this at the top. That’s why this shit will never stop until it’s banned from all creative media.

5

u/MorallyDeplorable Jun 28 '25

It's not possible to ban. Ignoring how pointless wanting to ban it is, thinking it's possible at all at this point is just being out of touch.

3

u/SkunkMonkey Jun 28 '25

Internet Age Pyramid Scam.

2

u/Turakamu Jun 28 '25

Who the fuck is Johnny Computer Skies?

3

u/Fearyn Jun 28 '25

And we have ai generated articles talking about it where ai comments on it. Crazy fucking stupid world we living in 😂

3

u/somesoundbenny Jun 28 '25

Dildo in a fleshlight

2

u/lgduckwall Jun 28 '25

Robots like music too.

2

u/nj_crc Jun 28 '25

Dead Internet Theory.

1

u/cronenber9 Jun 28 '25

Nick Land was right wasn't he...

1

u/vanda-schultz Jun 30 '25

So a million bot listens generates how many $ ?

5

u/boreal_ameoba Jun 28 '25

Eh, I actually doubt this.

AI Generated music has a LOT fewer obvious tells than visual or textual content. On top of that, most people listen to music casually, in the background, not actively. I'm sure there's bots in the playcount, but I'd be surprised if it was significantly higher or lower than average.

3

u/Anymousie Jun 28 '25

Why would bots be listening to the music? Feels like too easy of a cop out to the simply fact that people are listening to AI music without realizing it,

2

u/Jammb Jun 28 '25

Presumably to clock up streams, earning dollars and training the algorithm.

3

u/Deranged_Kitsune Jun 28 '25

I read an article probably, a year ago or more now, about spotify who was suing someone who used AI to make a whole bunch of songs and then used an army of bots to "listen" to them all. He did that thing that stupid thieves do and got too greedy, goosing the numbers to such an anomalously high point that it drew attention of the company and they figured out his payout scam. If he'd just kept it low but steady, he might have gotten away with it.

3

u/8636396 Jun 28 '25

Sorry, but how does AI count towards the listener count? It's not literally playing the track somewhere, is it?

1

u/metalgtr84 Jun 28 '25

It would cost Spotify money though to have bots running that actually downloaded each song and “listened” to it. It would be easier to just fake the numbers.

1

u/Vitringar Jun 28 '25

Or Spotify is just cooking the numbers to push this crap to virality

1

u/Glittering-Giraffe58 Jun 28 '25

Why would thus be likely?

1

u/JohnnyButtocks Jun 29 '25

Well a lot of people are probably listening now as a direct result of this press cycle. The whole thing feels cooked up to me.

101

u/BobbyTables829 Jun 28 '25

Dead Internet theory

46

u/Slumunistmanifisto Jun 28 '25

No, there's at least 14 of us on here

15

u/prigmutton Jun 28 '25

Indeed fellow meatsack

3

u/Slumunistmanifisto Jun 28 '25

My boss is a real 0010100110 if you know what I mean 

3

u/prigmutton Jun 28 '25

01101100 01101111 01101100

1

u/GregBahm Jun 28 '25
  1. I'm not really here.

1

u/StarPhished Jun 29 '25

I'm as real as you are >.>

1

u/cherrycoloured Jun 29 '25
  1. im actually a horse, not a person.

7

u/unpopularopinion0 Jun 28 '25

it feels more like a prediction of where it’s headed. and yeah. i’m with it. it might be time for this little ride to come to an end.

3

u/FangoriouslyDevoured Jun 28 '25

You know what sucks? At this point, I'm not even really sure how to prove I'm human in text form anymore.

36

u/[deleted] Jun 28 '25

Yeah and that's probably what will piss off Spotify in the end. They're not making money from bot "listeners". 

32

u/Bludypoo Jun 28 '25

Why not? It's the ads the make revenue; a bot hitting play on the song is still receiving the ads.

41

u/ab216 Jun 28 '25

CPA / CAC for advertisers will be high since traffic / conversions will be low and they’ll figure it’s due to Spotify and drop spend

20

u/QuintoBlanco Jun 28 '25

As an advertiser: companies like Spotify don't really care about this. Part of the problem is that buying ads on Spotify and YouTube et cetera is often outsourced and automated.

The number of people who actually analyze the effectiveness of these ad campaigns is low, because the main selling point of advertising on these services is how easy it is, plus everyone is doing it, so it's low risk from the personal perspective of the employees making the decisions.

And you can always buy a dodgy market research report that states that brand awareness is up because of these ads.

14

u/Boulderdrip Jun 28 '25

i work in advertising. it’s all bullshit and no one knows what they are doing.

2

u/Surreal__blue Jun 29 '25

Sounds like a work AI could be doing...

2

u/Nuxij Jun 29 '25

Except Rory Sutherland he seems to know

1

u/Bongoisnthere Jun 28 '25

That and it looks good for quarterly profits and investors.

“We had x number of listeners listening to royalty free music that we collect 100% of profits from” sounds pretty attractive to investors

1

u/Sensitive-Tone5279 Jun 29 '25

If I were an advertiser and putting real actual money towards promoting my business, I wouldn't advertise on Spotify if N number of "listeners" were bots.

6

u/One-Razzmatazz8216 Jun 28 '25

Pretty sure it’s Spotify that made this artist so they have to pay out less to real artists

4

u/Independent-Draft639 Jun 28 '25

The real issue is that this is probably Spotify's own AI music and the reason it has so many listens is that they are trying to push their AI music into playlists. That way they don't have to pay anybody royalties.

2

u/zookytar Jun 29 '25

The most sensical comment here

1

u/PatrenzoK Jun 28 '25

They don’t even need bots for that, Spotify can just say that’s the number.

1

u/victorspoilz Jun 28 '25

Dead Music Industry Theory

1

u/neverthoughtidjoin Stubborn Rock Fan, Mostly Jun 28 '25

They were in my Release Radar this week. I'm sure they're in lots of peoples' playlists. Coming soon to Discover Weekly

1

u/robotwizard_9009 Jun 28 '25

Its called money laundering...

1

u/Ylsid Jun 28 '25

Less than you think. Do you remember the Reddit post a while back about the guy who spent 2 hours listening to AI slop and was angry about it after?

1

u/lemonylol Jun 28 '25

Ultimately, at what point are we supposed to stop people from enjoying what they enjoy?

1

u/Kieran__ Jun 29 '25

If they're the type to be dishonest and use AI while pretending to be a real group of people (which is already basically a dishonest attempt at manipulation of the spotify algorithm) then they 100% would being willing to manipulate the spotify algorithm in other ways, I'm 99% convinced they used bots for sure