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!
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.
my strategy is to not listen to music, but that may not be the best solution for everyone
Spicetify has an anti AI extension for songs known to be AI, but I can’t say how effective it is.
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
I find bands by going to shows. I buy vinyl there and add their music to my playlists.
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.
I listen to bands I trust and older music mostly
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.
Now, this is also what pisses me off about ai. I listen to older music to stay away from it. That might sound crazy, but the world is crazy…
i think last.fm + soulseek kinda works. i haven’t seen shitty ai tracks on both of them.
Easy … I don’t download it.
By listening to music from before AI slop existed.
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.
Using Bandcamp
https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/
