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.
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.
By not updating my music taste for the last 15 years
Be warned that all styles of music are getting AI inserted into them.
Your method works as long as you never use an algorithm to mix your playlist, but as soon as you do, you’re likely to get an AI track inserted into your ears, even if it’s 70s classic rock.
Music peaked right around the time I was 20.
That may be when you stopped actively seeking new music. There are loads of amazing new artists in every genre. There is so much good new stuff coming out its hard to keep up.
Yeah, same.
I only sub to Deezer, a French streaming service that actively filters AI music and blocks it from their algorithms and search results.
Pretty much what every one of my friends have done. My kids were a great source in their late teens / early twenties. But as they’ve gotten older now they pretty much listen to the same stuff.
No, I’m not going to have more kids.
Yeah this is also a key part lol
Spicetify has an anti AI extension for songs known to be AI, but I can’t say how effective it is.
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.
I think I read that Qobutz at least tries to work against AI music.
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.
Spotify generate it themselves
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.
- AI music can only exist because artists exist, SE we need to keep paying artists enough to keep working
You’re wrong about that. Plenty of people do music as a hobby. There will always be more content to scrape. Expecting the system to crash because nobody plays music anymore is unrealistic.
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
Using Bandcamp
https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/
I find bands by going to shows. I buy vinyl there and add their music to my playlists.
I listen to bands I trust and older music mostly
Are you using Spotify ?
Because they are mainly known for 2 things:
- they are nazi cunts who platform nazi cunts and play ads for nazi cunts
- they flood their library with slop as a way to funnel money to themselves rather than to legitimate artists.
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!
Never stumbled upon AI generated music ever.
I have my local library with ripped CDs and pirated music mostly from the 2010s and below.
When I feel like discovering new music, I
- browse forums to find arists similar to those I already listen to
- I search for artists that have been featured in a collab in songs I already listen to
- Or, I use ListenBrainz’s Weekly Exploration tab when I’m feeling bored.
No streaming bullshit, AI algorithms made to keep me hooked, and definetly no AI music to be seen or heard.
♥️♥️♥️
Also +1 to the guy that mentioned to listen to your local music scene! I have as many smaller local artists as I possibly can in my library. I’m always looking for random stickers on the streets or festival posters, and then I get home and look all of them up to see if they’re my jam.
I’ll need to do that. I don’t today. I will.
my strategy is to not listen to music, but that may not be the best solution for everyone
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.
By listening to music from before AI slop existed.
FACTS! Unless it randomly starts to come on Pandora then I get will mad.
