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!
Are you using Spotify ?
Because they are mainly known for 2 things:
I’m not aware of a streaming service completely free of slop, but I know some like Qobuz are actively detecting and removing it.
+1 for Qobuz. Seems like an ethical company. They pay artists 4x Spotify rates too.
Bamdcamp took a stand against blatant slop but will allow artists to use some generative methods in their music.
Tbf some generative methods are cool and foster creativity, like modular synthesis.
There’s nothing wrong about using randomness to get your creative juices flowing. People have been using card decks, dice, Euclidean rhythms, sample and hold and so on for a long time (Andrew Huang has a lot of examples of tracks where the main instrument, theme and genre are randomly picked). I guess sanitized, corporate slop could be used the same way, as long as the artist is fully in control of the creative process. For me the line stops where slop is used as is, with no human creative input.
Can you elaborate on that first point please?
They ran ICE ads and only stopped because the campaign ended, not because of massive backlash: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/09/spotify-no-longer-running-ice-recruitment-ads-after-us-government-campaign-ends
They hosted and donated to the orange shitstain while disproportionately targeting “controversial” black artists: https://www.themarysue.com/spotify-supporting-donald-trump-is-horrifically-hypocritical-after-how-theyve-treated-controversial-black-and-brown-musicians/
They pay hundreds of millions to nazi propagandists for the exclusive rights to spread their hate: https://apnews.com/article/joe-rogan-spotify-deal-76fa0e2c9d4b137f510428528ea6226b
The CEO stepped down to make AI weapons with Peter thiel : https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2025-07-31/spotifys-ceo-owns-an-ai-weapons-company-some-musicians-say-its-time-to-leave
Thank you for the info!
I’m not, I’m using YouTube music which isn’t much better. I’m still looking for another platform to use but so far I need multiple to get all the music I like in one place.
Though I’ve considered buying CDs again and ripping them for local storage…
Same boat here. YouTube music and AI songs being more common. For right now if I hear someone new I check to see if they had an album before 2025… This method won’t be viable for much longer.
Thank you!