Spotify says it pulled 50 million junk tracks

Spotify, the music streaming service, said on October 20 it has pulled more than 50 million junk and spam tracks from recommendations this year. That compares with 75 million tracks removed outright, a figure from September 2025 that Spotify has not updated, Music Business Worldwide reported.

To earn recording royalties, a track needs 1,000 streams and a minimum number of unique listeners within 12 months, Music Business Worldwide reported. Spotify says tracks likely to be AI-generated are 10 times more likely to miss that threshold.

SOCAN, Canada’s largest member-owned music rights organization, collects licence fees and pays them as royalties to songwriters, composers and publishers. SOCAN said on September 2 that it had filed a lawsuit against Suno Inc., which runs a generative AI platform. It alleges the platform replicates human-created works without consent or payment; the outcome is not yet known.

YouTube Music began labelling mainly AI-made songs on October 14, Music Business Worldwide reported.

Sources: Spotify Newsroom · Music Business Worldwide · SOCAN