I keep ending up with AI music in my playlist when exploring for me music. What is your workflow to avoid it? Searching DDG for me has been more bandwidth intensive than I like…
Some background. My favorite song is a song I haven’t heard yet. And my appetite sways wildly. One month it’s old school urban rap, the next it’s kpop, and then Nordic death metal and so on.
I never know what I’ll be in the mood for but I’ll find a thread with a song I don’t know and use it to build play lists to see what I find and sometimes I find trash gems that way.
This last time our friend group watched Eurovision 2026 together and some of those songs are bangers. One of them led to adding a few artists built off of playlists from that song I really liked, and they all ended up being AI… damnit!
Listen to artists I know are human, if the artist doesn’t show up in a web search sorry but they gotta go its too risky
Piracy. Private trackers are genuinely better stewards and curators of their libraries because unlike the the slop factories, they’re made by real humans, for real humans.
Don’t use Spotify, they actively try to put AI shit into your playlist so they have to pay less royalties. Not sure how scumbaggy other services are.
YouTube music is what I’m using, add them to your list of scum please.
How would they pay less royalties? That AI music is still being uploaded by someone.
All AI work is public domain, but also, its thought that Spotify themselves likely create some of that AI content - although I’m not familiar enough with Spotify to confirm that myself.
It can be presumed that Spotify is doing that to some degree. There is consensus amongst scientists studying the field, artists, labels and other people in the field about that.
The public domain thing is kind a useless argument at this point; It is the case law we are building upon currently but that’s basically just because haven’t gotten a broader legal framework yet and we’re still making AI fit into what we have.
But we don’t have to answer by citing to the law, we can answer by looking at the ethics and expecting the law to loosely follow our ethics - that’s what it is designed to do.
- AI takes ideas from other artists without giving credit
- AI is trained on art without paying for it
- AI can use other artists branding and likeness without their consent
- artists make less because AI takes an increasingly bigger cut of the revenue (it’s kinda zero-sum, but let’s skip that conversation)
- AI music can only exist because artists exist, SE we need to keep paying artists enough to keep working
- AI might is possibly being used in some instances for money laundering
And so on.
I’m trying to say this because the law is there to follow our feelings. If we structurally don’t condone something to a certain level as a society, we make it illegal or we regulate it.
And as you can see, there’s plenty of reasons to regulate and some are straight up financial, so we definitely should do something about it.
And with “we” I mean specifically the Republicans and Democrats, the FCC (regulation to combat market disruption), judges, civil rights lawyers, and possible plaintiffs all have the chance to push us into a better position societally.
Shoutout to Bernie Sanders, he’s trying to start a movement about it, and as always he’s ahead of the curve in Congress.
Spotify generate it themselves
I think I read that Qobutz at least tries to work against AI music.
My answer is - buy music. Not only because that way you’ll get actual human works of art by real musicians who you like, but also because that way they stand a chance of actually being able to make a living so they can, y’know, make more music.
The answer is stop using streaming services. The AI problem will only get worse as people keep paying for these services because what CEO is okay paying an artist a premium when they could instead generate slop and sell that for the same price? But your music on Bandcamp or sail the seas, just stop using Spotify.
This. Streaming services are doing to music what Lars Ulrich thought Napster would do.
There is a local music festival to me and as part of their promo, they have a playlist with songs from every band on a Spotify playlist. I imagine it’s something other music festivals do and could be good to build a library of music you know is made by real people
I didn’t think of this… I need to go to more of these. Thank you!
Listen to songs that are more then 10 years old. My autism doesn’t like new music so I just have a playlist of over 4k. Although I did add a few from music creators from TikTok. Very little though. I’m quite strict
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I find bands by going to shows. I buy vinyl there and add their music to my playlists.
Spicetify has an anti AI extension for songs known to be AI, but I can’t say how effective it is.
my strategy is to not listen to music, but that may not be the best solution for everyone
I own my media. I have old vinyl, 8-tracks, cassettes, cd’s and digital files. I’ve never once “streamed” music except when I turned on my AC Delco radio back in the 70’s.
I used to be able to just start a “smooth jazz” or “lo-fi” playlist and the algorithm would do its thing, but now I need to specifically look for “classics” or some such otherwise the slop shows up. I’ve not yet had this issue with the rest of my musical landscape though as that does default to real bands, but these “background” styles are definitely affected.
i think last.fm + soulseek kinda works. i haven’t seen shitty ai tracks on both of them.
I don’t stream music, I buy albums on Bandcamp pretty much exclusively for lack of better options. Then I play them to death, and buy another handful. Some piracy. Some vinyl purchases.
I haven’t come across any AI slop in my favourite genres top of the month lists on Bandcamp yet.
