Spotify

Spotify has spent months deleting music made with AI. Now he wants to sell it as a premium product

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In just a few weeks, Spotify has been changing its position on AI-generated music: months ago it removed more than 75 million fraudulent tracks, launched a distinctive seal so listeners knew when there were human hands on the other side, and tightened its filters against synthetic spam. But the turn came in the talk for investors on May 21, where it became clear that what worries Spotify is not AI, but generating income with it. The precedents. Let’s start with the moves Spotify has made to control the rampant presence of AI on the platform. In September 2025 the company revealed that had removed more than 75 million fraudulent leads of its platform in the previous twelve months. Many of the AI ​​actions were malicious: massive raises designed to steal royaltiesunauthorized voice clones and content which the company’s own executives called “slop.” By then Deezer had detected that it received more than 30,000 AI-generated tracks per day, and that up to 77% of its reproductions were fraudulent. Just a few weeks before the meeting with investors, on April 30, Spotify launched the “Verified by Spotify” seal, a verification mark that distinguishes human artists from the artificial ones, which are increasingly proliferating on the platform. To achieve it, musicians must demonstrate authentic activity, have linked social media accounts and concerts on the agenda (something that, as we have said over the last few months, does not guarantee anything, given the latest successes of AI-generated music, which have their following on networks and their continuous stream of releases). Deals with Universal. The main news before shareholders is a licensing agreement with Universal Music Group, the largest record label in the world, which will allow Spotify Premium subscribers create covers and remixes with generative AI of songs from the artists participating in the agreement. The tool will arrive as a paid add-on to the usual subscription. It was already known that Spotify was considering charging up to an additional $5.99 per month for a “Music Pro” tier with superfan features. Co-CEO Alex Norström said that with this tool, “one song would become 10,000 songs.” The agreement contemplates a revenue sharing model with participating artists, and it was made clear that participation will be completely voluntary by the musicians. This announcement is no surprise: we already knew that Spotify was working on AI products with Universal, Sony, Warner, Merlin and Believe, but without a closed legal framework. Universal had previously licensed its catalog to smaller AI platforms, such as Udio, Klay Vision and Stability AI, but here it is already we enter in the 761 million monthly active users and 293 million paying subscribers. Long live AI. In an interviewNorström made it clear that, faced with multiple tools that allow songs to be manipulated without permission, they want to be the “legal” and “controlled” option. Norström affirms that the synthetic music market already exists and that trying to stop it would be useless, so he proposes regulating it from within, with agreements between labels and platforms, and turning it into a source of income for all actors. To combat AI content that “makes you feel good in the moment” but ultimately leaves the user feeling like they’ve “wasted their time,” Spotify offers verified authors and artists who charge for it. High tension. The announcement comes at a time when many powerful players are beginning to understand the extent of what they are risking. On May 13, a week before the investor meeting, famous producer Jack Antonoff (he has worked with Taylor Swift, Lorde and Lana Del Rey) posted on Instagram against those who use AI to make music. Norström acknowledged in the interview that there is “some negativity out there” regarding AI and called it “reasonable,” although he added that it is due to “poorly aligned AI.” swerve I mean, potify has spent months arguing that the problem with AI in music was fraud, spam, and impersonation. Now it announces that the same synthetic content, controlled and profitable, may be desirable. As we said in our analysis of the algorithmic model that Spotify has built for years linked above, the platform has been encouraging listening that prioritizes the state of mind over the identity of the artist for some time. That is, the ideal breeding ground for synthetic music. All that was left was monetization. In Xataka | We put Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music to the test: music streaming has changed and there is no longer an obvious winner

Spotify charts have been filled with AI songs. It is largely a consequence of what Spotify has encouraged

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Songs like ‘I still breathe‘ either ‘I loved myself more‘, performed by Ruby Black, have topped Spotify’s algorithmic charts in Spain for weeks. Ruby Black does not exist: she is a singer generated with artificial intelligence distributed by a label called Silencio Capital, with more than one hundred thousand followers on Instagram and a new single every Thursday. Spotify is now announcing measures that try to quell this wave of synthetic artists, but everything indicates that this new situation is here to stay. And we have asked for it. Who’s that girl. In April 2026Ruby Black topped the first spot on Spotify’s list of The 50 Most Viral in Spain. Soul-type ballads, very soft, with vocal echoes of Rosalía and other fashion trends in pop in Spanish, lyrics of heartbreak and improvement, and covers and video clips generated by artificial intelligence. Google’s own AI, when consulted about the artist, lied when describing her as a “human, not AI, singer, known for ballads like ‘I Still Breathe’.” How are the machines? Its release of weekly singles is unequivocal: chain production applied to entertainment, thanks to a catalog that continually grows, minimal cost, zero emotional ties with real creators… Ruby Black is not the only one of her kind: the same viral top, as different media have commented, includes equally dubious artists such as Nyx Solaris. But Ruby Black is the one who has reached the highest thanks to the undoubted advantage of singing in Spanish. There is AI but… how much AI? According to what he said Deezer this monthreceive around 75,000 completely AI-generated tracks every day, 44% of all new content. In January 2025, just over a year ago, there were only 10,000. Spotify, for its part, removed more than 7.5 million tracks generated by AI in the twelve months prior to September 2025, many of them linked to mass generation tools. Its entire catalog is around 100 million songs. We don’t distinguish it. It is not only an ethical issue, but it is increasingly difficult to identify AI-generated music. A study commissioned by Deezer with 9,000 people in eight countries published in November 2025 concluded that 97% of the participants were not able to distinguish between songs generated by AI and human songs in a blind test. 80% of them believed that 100% artificial music should be clearly labeled. The demand exists but the platforms have not yet reacted. Step forward from Deezer. In fact, Deezer is the only one that, to date, has implemented its own detection system. In June 2025 began flagging albums that included 100% AI-generated tracks and to exclude them from algorithmic recommendations and editorial playlists. In January 2026 put that same technology on sale so that other platforms could take advantage of it. Deezer also found that 85% of streams of AI music are fraudulent, and that is why it excludes them from its distribution of royalties. It is the only one that has taken such an openly anti-AI stance. Apple Music launched in March 2026 Transparency Tagsa metadata system that allows labels and distributors to voluntarily declare whether they have used AI in vocals, songwriting, cover art or video. And Spotify works with DDEXthe music industry standards body, on a metadata system for song credits that indicates how AI has been used, also voluntary. Spotify’s latest move. To all this, the most followed platform has added the verification seal ‘Verified by Spotify‘ to ensure that there are humans behind each artist profile. Artists like Ruby Black are, precisely, proof that the formula limps: with a massive following on networks, a single every week, and number one on the top viral list in Spain, he has everything Spotify needs to award him the “real artist” label. A well-managed synthetic avatar can meet Spotify’s criteria (consistent activity, compliance with platform policies, signs of an artist’s real presence) and be a synthetic creation. The root of the problem. The truth is that all this fuss was not born with generative models. Liz Pelly, author of the book ‘Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist’, has been documenting for years how Spotify has systematically built a listening model based on lean-back listening: mood playlists, algorithmic recommendations that prioritize the most generic song in an artist’s catalog, the content that works best as a background sound. The author also revealed the existence of the internal program called Perfect Fit Content (PFC): since 2017, Spotify has filled its most popular playlists with “ghost artists” musicproduced in series to reduce the cost of royalties. Twenty composers were behind the work of more than five hundred “artists”and its tracks were listened to millions of times. Playlists such as Deep Focus, Cocktail Jazz or Ambient Relaxation were almost entirely composed by Perfect Fit Content. AI has not broken into a healthy ecosystem: platforms have been favoring anonymous, interchangeable and depersonalized content for years. And awarded by the algorithm. The Instagram-core. The phenomenon has an exact reflection on Instagram. In the same way that there is a Instagram-core (that homogeneous aesthetic of Reels with fast transitions, viral music, warm light and motivational text), there is almost the Spotify-core that Ruby Black represents. That is, designed to exceed the thirty-second hearing threshold (quick emotional hook, recognizable or directly cloned voice, lyrics that impact at first) that Spotify counts as a listen. Or put another way: Spotify can delete 75 million tracks and announce anti-spam filters. But as long as it continues to reward with its algorithm the most comfortable, ephemeral and generic song to captivate a listener who listens without paying attention, Ruby Black is just one more profile (a millionaire, of course) in a problem that has been brewing for years. In Xataka | Dear Spotify, it’s about time you had a button that allows you to filter AI-generated music

Spotify and Apple Music have a problem with AI-generated music. And the real musicians are paying for it

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Music generated by AI has flooded the large platforms of streaming without anyone having asked for it. Deezer says it detects 75,000 AI tracks uploaded every day, and the number is growing. Spotify has uploaded 75 million songs of that type in the last twelve months. And Apple Music recognizes that more than a third of everything that comes to it is “100% AI”. Why is it important. It is not only a quality problem for the catalog or the reputation of the platform, but also an economic problem. Spotify, Apple Music and most platforms operate with a proportional distribution model (pro-rata): each artist receives a percentage of the total pool royalties equivalent to your reproduction quota. The more AI songs that accumulate listeners (even if they are fraudulent, generated by bots) the more it dilutes what a real musician earns. Between the lines. Although more and more music of this type is uploaded, almost no one listens to it, at least on purpose (sometimes AI songs sneak into algorithmic discovery lists). The problem is not the demand, which does not exist, but the brutal and increasing amount that distorts the algorithms and erodes the income of real artists even though their songs are still the ones that people do want to hear. Someone is uploading music that no one asks for to collect money that they do not deserve because the listeners arrive via bots. And that is money that the real artist stops earning. The background. The most extreme case, at least documented so far, has been that of Michael Smith, an American businessman who between 2017 and 2024 generated more than 10 million dollars in royalties wearing Suno and other tools to create hundreds of thousands of songs and armies of bots to play them automatically. That was the first case of fraud streaming with AI criminally prosecuted in the United States. According to the accusation, it accumulated 660,000 views a day. One billion views and zero fans. Yes, but. The platforms are already facing this wave. Deezer has been the most aggressive: it has implemented AI automatic detection, excludes those songs from algorithmic recommendations and has demonetized 85% of its views. Bandcamp has outright banned AI-generated music. Apple Music has begun to roll out its ‘Transparency Tags‘ (optional for now), and Spotify has released a verification stamp ‘Verified by Spotify‘ to ensure there is a human behind every artist profile. The problem is that both Spotify and Apple have opted for voluntary systems: it is the labels and distributors who must declare whether they have used AI. Nobody who lives off fraud is going to do it. There is an important distinction: It is one thing for a musician to use AI as a tool within their creative process (to refine a lyric, generate a base, experiment with sounds…) and quite another for an entire song to come out of Suno or equivalent with a pair of prompts and without real human intervention. The platforms, at the moment, do not distinguish between one thing and another. And Spotify has also left a door open by noting that “the concept of artistic authenticity is complex and rapidly evolving,” which in practice means that AI artists could end up being verified one day. Featured image | Xataka In Xataka | Science has measured how music impacts us during exercise: choosing the right Spotify list is essential

choosing the Spotify list well is essential

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When you go running, cycling or simply going to the gym, there are some songs that seem to give us greater energy. And it is not just a subjective sensation, but science has been studying music for years as a tool that improves physical performancealthough without specific data. Now science has detailed exactly how much it can improve in numbers and, above all, where it will end up affecting. An experiment. This is something that researcher Andrew Danso has developed with the help of 29 physically active adults who performed high-intensity cycling sessions at 80% of their maximum power. But the important thing here is that the participants pedaled in two scenarios: in complete silence and listening to the music they had previously chosen with a tempo of between 120 and 140 beats per minute. The results. After being in these two situations, the research indicated that with music the cyclists lasted an average of six minutes longer than those who were completely silent, which represents an increase in resistance of 20%. Although it does not stop there, since, despite pedaling for longer, the heart rate and lactate levels (which determine how demanding the exercise was) at the end were identical to those who had been silent. This means that the feeling of effort was much less because they lasted longer with the same intensity, making the exercise sessions of much higher quality. Because? Here the question is quite clear: How is it possible to perform 20% more without the body paying for it with a higher heart rate? For science, one of the answers lies in cognitive dissociation, since music acts as a barrier that diverts attention from the signals of pain, muscle burning and fatigue that the body sends to the brain. Studies here indicate that this distraction reduces perception of effort by about 12%. But it doesn’t stop there, since by adjusting the rhythm of the exercise, such as pedaling, to the tempo of the music, the movement becomes more efficient, causing less energy to be spent to do the same work because the rhythm acts as a metronome that optimizes the cadence. The importance of the song. A crucial detail of the Finnish study is that the music was chosen by the athletes themselves, since it is not enough to put a generic ‘training music’ playlist on Spotify, but for the effect to be maximum there must be an emotional connection with the song. In addition, very calm music is not useful, but it must have a tempo in the range of 120-140 BPM so that it is a motivating rhythm and easy to synchronize with sports activity. And it is not something new, because already In the past there were studies that pointed to this improvement in performance, although now it goes a little further. Images | freepik In Xataka | In the fever to train strength, the gym has faced competition: more and more people train on the street

The POCO X8 Pro lands in Spain with double discount and subscriptions to YouTube Premium and Spotify

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February and March are being very busy months in terms of mobile launches. The latest to arrive has been the new generation of POCO from Xiaomi, and as it cannot be missed, it is accompanied by discounts, gifts and an edition that more than one superhero fan may like. If you are interested, the POCO X8 Pro It is available in several configurations: In addition, if you buy it right now in the official store, Xiaomi offers another additional discount and several gifts: 20 euro coupon. Free trial of YouTube Premium (two months) and Spotify Premium (three months). Double My Points. Trade In option, so by handing in an old device you can receive an additional discount. The price could vary. We earn commission from these links A new generation arrives He POCO X8 Pro It is interesting for many reasons beyond its particular edition of Iron Man. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that it comes with a 6,500 mAh batterya fairly large figure considering that we are talking about a compact (6.59 inches) and thin (8.38 mm) mobile phone. In addition, the battery supports 100W fast charging, so you can have it charged in a very short time. The AMOLED panel offers a 1.5K resolution and a 120 Hz refresh rate, so it will look very fluid at all times. Xiaomi has opted in this case to mount the chip Dimensity 8500-Ultraso it has very good power if what you are looking for is to play with your mobile. Of course, the POCO X8 Pro comes with HyperOS 3.0 As an operating system and at a photographic level, it comes with a 20 MP front camera and a rear module that is made up of a 50 MP main sensor (with optical stabilization) and an 8 MP wide angle. ⚡ IN SUMMARY: POCO X8 Pro offer today ✅ THE BEST Your batterywhich allows you to use your mobile phone without depending so much on the charger. In addition, it supports very fast charging so you can have it charged in a matter of minutes. The introductory offerwhich not only consists of a discount, but also a coupon and several gifts through months of subscriptions to YouTube and Spotify. ❌ THE WORST Like practically any mobile phone, it comes without a chargerso if you don’t have one that supports fast mobile charging, you won’t be able to take advantage of it. 💡 BUY IT IF… You are looking for a mobile phone whose battery lasts more than a day, that can be purchased in the maximum storage capacity (512 GB) without the price going up much and that also has a good processor. ⛔ DON’T BUY IT IF… Are you looking for a mobile phone that stands out above all in photography or that has an even larger battery, for which we have the POCO X8 Pro Max which comes with an 8,500 mAh battery. You may also be interested

How to link Apple Music or Spotify to TikTok to save the music you discover in the social network’s videos there

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Let’s tell you how to link Apple Music or Spotify to TikTokand thus be able to save the music you find in the videos in your music library. When you do this, the service you choose will become the one TikTok uses by default. The operation is simple. Once you have linked them, when you are watching TikTok and a video with a song appears, an indicator will appear that tells you what the topic is. Then, by clicking on the name you can open it directly in your music streaming application. Link Apple Music or Spotify to TikTok The first thing you have to do is enter TikTok and click on the options button to open the side tab. When you do it, click on the option Settings and privacy to enter the social network settings. Once you are in the TikTok settings, go to the section Content and screen. in here, click on the section Music that will appear to you. Within the Music section, click on the option Link within the option of Add to music app. You will go to a screen where you will be able choose the default music app to add songs from TikTok. Here, you can click on one of them, the one you use. When you choose one of the options, you will go to the application or website of this music service, and you will be able to accept that you connect to TikTok and both services are linked. TikTok will be able to see data from your account and perform actions for you, such as adding songs. Add TikTok music to Spotify Once you have linked a streaming service, simply browse as normal. When there is a song in a TikTok video, you will see that there is an indicator of the topic it containsand you can click on it. You can also click on the round icon at the bottom right. When you click on the song nameyou will go to a screen where you can have your information, the publications that use it, and options to use it yourself or save it to favorites. Here, you will also have a button to add it to Spotify or Apple Musicdepending on which one you have chosen. This will add the song to your playlist of songs you like on Apple Music or Spotify, the one created when you “Like” any of the songs. In Xataka Basics | Alternatives to TikTok: the main social video networks to go to if you are thinking of changing

How to know if the music you listen to on Spotify or Apple Music is from a real artist or made by artificial intelligence

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Let’s give you some clues about how to detect if the music you are listening to Is it by a real artist or is it made by artificial intelligence. We are going to focus on that music that is on streaming platforms like Spotify or Apple Music. The way to detect it is not by looking for things in the music itself, but looking at the artist who created the song. Music made by artificial intelligence does not stop flood streaming servicesand they are having enough trouble stopping it. Many times it is easy to detect, it is music without soul, but one way or another, they are there taking clicks and listens, and the money that should go to real musicians. Therefore, we are going to give you a list of things you should pay attention to to detect if what you hear is from a real musician or not. It is not that if one of these points is met it is music made by AI, but that the more of these red flags it raises, the more it will be pointed in that direction. Listen carefully to the music If you are going to check if an artist is real or if they are songs made by AI, it is possibly because you are noticing something strange in the music. Here, you will be able to notice it especially depending on the musical genre you listen to. This is because elements such as excessively clean voices or lack of natural breathing can be the first indication, although in some commercial genres you will also find this due to excess production. Ultimately, the music will sound artificial, soulless. The phrases in the case of singing will sound mechanical and without any emotion, and the lyrics will also be quite bad. Pay attention to how the instruments sound musicals, because if they sound too compact, like a mush where you can’t distinguish each one of them and their clean sound, it could also be due to AI… or again, due to bad production. Biography and photo of the artist If music has left you suspicious, play then Click on the artist’s name to enter their profile within the streaming platform. The first thing that may make you suspicious is that there is no photo of the artist or the bandand instead there is some landscape or generic image. The fact that the photo of the band is not a photo of the musicians or the soloist is something that should make us suspicious. In the case of a photo of people appearing, you can check if it is made by AI, if it looks unnatural or if there is an excess of processing of the image, but normally AI artists do not usually risk this. It is also worth checking the biography of the artist or band. Look out for some suspicious signs, like the fact that it doesn’t include names of the members, where they are from, or those biographical data that usually give you a little more context about the artists. Instead, “musicians” made by AI will give ambiguous descriptions, and there will be times when in a fit of honesty they will directly say that it is music made by artificial intelligence. Discography and volume of releases The next step would be to look at your albums. If you see that their first releases have been around for many years, this would indicate that they are a normal band, because the AI ​​that generates music has only been able to resemble real music for a couple of years or three. If the releases they have are all new, it could also be because they are a new artist. Then look at the volume of the pitches. Human musicians, those of flesh and blood, can take from one to five or six years to release each new record. If you see that the artist has 2 or 5 full albums released in two monthsthen this should set off all the alarms. It’s AI. And by this we mean albums, not singles or individual songs. you should also pay attention to how the music sounds. If all the songs seem too samey you should also be suspicious, and if the track titles are too generic and simple too. Real artists are not a donut factorythey are not going to release an album every two weeks or every two months, because this requires a process of composition, recording, mastering, and creation of physical formats. Nobody is going to release 40 songs to you in a year if they don’t cheat. Find information about the artist and his concerts If your suspicions are still there, then comes the next level, that of looking for information about these artists on other pages. The first thing could be search for photos or videos of live concerts on YouTube, Facebook or Instagram. Also look for news on music websites. You can also search for concert dates, if they appear at festivals, if they are mentioned on networks. Come on, there must be proof that they are artists that someone has seen or known, because the normal thing is that the objective of musicians is to play live, not simply record albums. You can also search for his name on specialized platforms. Discogs is the largest database of albums and music releases on the Internet, it is a good place to start, in addition to Wikipedia or All Music. Also look for specialized media, such as Metal Archives for rock and heavy metal, and those for other musical genres. In the end, If it seems as if the artist does not exist because there are no photos or any reference outside of streaming platforms… possibly because they don’t exist. There will be artists who use AI In short, if everything we have told you above points in one direction, you will have already located a fake musician who is really an AI algorithm. … Read more

Spotify has had to remove 75 million songs made with AI. Bandcamp has decided not to have that problem

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The Bandcamp music streaming and sales platform has announced that will completely ban music generated “in whole or in substantial part” by artificial intelligence, becoming the first major music distribution service to establish such a restrictive barrier against synthetic content. Bandcamp thus draws a very clear red line in the debate about where the use of creative tools ends and where total automation that dispenses with human authorship begins. What does the statement say? Bandcamp’s statement presents two fundamental prohibitions. On the one hand, any musical content generated entirely or substantially through artificial intelligence, a formulation that avoids defining exact percentages but establishes that there is a threshold regarding the weight of AI in the creative process. On the other hand, it extends the prohibition to the use of algorithmic tools to replicate styles or voices of real artists, connecting this restriction with the platform’s pre-existing policies against identity theft and intellectual property infringement. Citizen collaboration. The advertisement includes a complaint mechanism For users: users can report suspicious material using the platform’s reporting tools, which will be reviewed by a moderation team. The company explicitly reserves the right to remove music suspected of having synthetic origin, without the need for conclusive evidence, a clause that gives wide freedom to moderators but could also generate false positives. The company acknowledged that the policy may require updates as the generative AI landscape evolves, referring to how quickly these technologies are being developed. The conceptual debate. This decision is part of the debate about AI and creativity that is going through the world of culture: using algorithms as instruments as opposed to delegating the creative act to them. The United States Copyright Office established in January 2025 that work generated by AI can be registered when it “incorporates significant human authorship,” but that content produced solely through promptswithout additional creative intervention, falls into the public domain for lack of a recognizable author. Nuances and tools. And it is difficult to determine the limits. The spectrum ranges from musicians who use AI to clean up audio or get inspired by melodies to those who simply write text instructions and let the model generate entire tracks. There are conceptual artists who go to the opposite extreme of artificial intervention: composer Holly Herndon turned her voice into the project Holly+ into a “digital instrument” that is publicly accessible and that other musicians can play. The debate is endless: MIT Technology Review raised in April that tools like Suno and Udio produce “creators” who are not conventional musicians but “prompters“. The result is works that cannot be attributed to a composer or singer, dissolving the usual definitions of authorship. The flood. The figures reveal an exponential escalation in the appearance of music created with AI on platforms. Deezer spoke in November 2025 of more than 50,000 tracks completely generated by AI each day, 34% of its daily volume, and an increase of 400% compared to January, when the figure was 10,000 songs per day. A study by Deezer itself said that 97% of listeners do not know how to distinguish between human and synthetic music after a blind test for the participants in the study in which they were shown two tracks, one with AI and one real. The Spotify drama. While, Spotify revealed in September 2025 which had removed 75 million “spam tracks” in the previous twelve months, an amount that rivals the platform’s entire catalog of 100 million songs. The emblematic case of the fictional indie band The Velvet Sundown illustrates the dimension of the phenomenon: this group completely generated by AI It reached 1.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify during the summer of 2025 before its creators admitted its synthetic nature, under pressure from listeners. Follow the money. The case of Xania Monet is another side of the problem. This fully synthetic R&B artist generated over $42,800 in less than two months with over 17 million streams totals, which led to the signing of a multimillion-dollar record contract after a bidding war where a record company allegedly offered $3 million. At the same time, country was the first genre to be marked as a big loser in this war between real and synthetic artists: in December 2025, the number of country songs generated by AI outsold completely human jobs. There is a clear motive for these maneuvers: money. Tools like Suno and Udio produce for free and a user can generate hundreds of short tracks that can generate profits. Let’s multiply it exponentially: massive uploads to platforms, bot farms that generate songs and upload songs without rest, automation of payments… We are not looking for isolated successes, but to add millions of reproductions, against which a real artist cannot compete. Percentages. And that’s why Bandcamp and Spotify are so different. Bandcamp is a marketplace straight where artists charge an average of 82% of each sale, with the platform keeping 15% on digital items and 10% on physical items, with additional payment processing commissions of 4-7%. bandcamp has paid more than 1,640,000 million dollars directly to artists and labels since its founding in 2008, with 19 million transferred in 2025 alone thanks to “Bandcamp Fridays”, days in which the company completely waives its commission. This structure makes AI-generated music counterproductive for the platform: no one buys synthetic albums produced by AI. prompts. Spotify, meanwhile, operates on a subscription basis, distributing roughly two-thirds of its total revenue in royalties. The platform paid 10 billion dollars to the music industry in 2024but the average payment for stream ranges between 0.003 and 0.005 dollars. Besides,Spotify implemented a threshold of 1,000 annual streams in 2024 for a track to generate royalties. This structure creates perverse incentives to “cheat”: virtually free AI production, mass uploading of tracks, use of bot farms to inflate the number of views… The pay-per-play system stream It allows tiny fractions of a cent to turn into million-dollar amounts if there is enough volume. The reaction. The Bandcamp movement has some protection of its image, … Read more

Spotify killed the record and the industry pivoted to concerts. Netflix killed cinema and the industry was left with a “space crisis”

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Never in history have we seen so many movies: the streaming It allows us to see several a week but, nevertheless, the movie theaters are empty. Literally emptier than ever in decades. We consume audiovisual content en masse, but not where we historically enjoyed it. Meanwhile, concerts have become the leisure alternative par excellence. Why do we pay hundreds of euros to go to a stadium with 50,000 other people, but not fifteen to see a blockbuster on the big screen? The answer lies in how we value physical space in the experience economy. Some figures. Let’s look at some box office figures: the summer of 2025, traditionally the most lucrative season in the industry, has been the most disastrous since 1981 adjusted for inflation. There is no dream of returning to pre-COVID figures: in October 2025 in the US, only 445 million dollars were raised, less than half of last October before the pandemicwhich exceeded one billion. The average viewer attended only 2.31 times to theaters in 2024, a drop of 33% compared to the 3.5 annual visits in 2019. In Spain, theThe 2025 data is equally dark: The total box office falls by 14% (almost 30 million less), and Spanish cinema itself declines by 2.5-3%. The author of this last study, Pau Brunet, expressly says that “the Hollywood fantasy is crumbling.” And the erosion is constant: Spain had more than 105 million viewers in 2019, which represents a loss of a third of its volume in five years: we are now at 71 million. Windows that don’t perform. The problem is so multifactorial that it is ridiculous to focus only on the drop in the box office to explain it. For example, we have the collapse of display windows: The pre-pandemic standard was 90-120 days in theaters, three or four weeks later in digital sales and then home formats and streaming. After the pandemic, these windows were reduced by more than 60%, and although they now vary depending on the studio, Universal and Warner leave a 45-day window for their most sought-after productions (it can be reduced to 17 days), with the exception of Disney, which operates them for 60 days. In any case, the rest of the windows have been shortened or disappeared, and it is common to watch a movie in streaming just a month and a half after its release in theaters. It is one of the main reasons why people have left the theaters: even blockbusters like ‘Wicked’ can be seen streaming just 40 days after their release in theaters. Even China. A few years ago, China was the market that seemed destined to save Hollywood accountsbut experienced its own collapse in 2024: the box office fell 23% to 42.5 billion yen ($5.8 billion), returning to figures from a decade ago. Attendance fell by more than 200 million viewers compared to ten years ago. One of the main reasons is the degradation of the theatrical experience: cinemas without air conditioning and without customer service staff beyond the bar, a characteristic that has been spreading to theaters around the world for years. The crisis has been going on for a long time. In reality, this fall does not have its roots in the streaming not even in the pandemic. The attendance of the American public had been falling since the sixtiesgoing from one visit per person every two or three months to just twice a year before the pandemic. The real price of admission (adjusted for inflation) has remained stable since the 1980s, but consumers have decided that they no longer want to go to theaters. The problem, as this Bain & Company study states The thing is that, for decades, the industry has placed all the emphasis of its production on pure content, but the films have ended up arriving home in a few weeks. Meanwhile, music has come to understand something fundamental: the value is not in the recorded content, but in the unique, unrepeatable event. The triumph of music. He Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour It closed in December 2024 after 149 concerts in 51 cities, ggenerating gross revenues of 2,077 million dollars. That is, more than the annual film box office receipts of entire countries (compare with the pyrrhic 71 million box office receipts in Spain in 2024). AND We’re not just talking about the concerts.: The average expense per attendee ranged between $1,300 and $1,500, including transportation, accommodation, merchandising and dinners. More than fans, they are tourists generating systemic economic impact. “Swiftonomics“has ceased to be a metaphor and has become a real analytical category in government economic reports. Beyond Taylor. Swift is not an anomaly. The global live music market generated $28.1 billion in 2023 and projections place it at $79.7 billion by 2030. That growth is equivalent to tripling the size of the market in seven years, while cinema struggles to recover the levels of a decade ago. What does live music have that cinema has lost? The term “funflation“: Consumers prioritize spending on memorable experiences even during periods of high inflation Festivals have capitalized on this logic: They sell identity, belonging and experiences that are impossible to replicate at home. Just the opposite of cinema: a film is exactly identical all over the world and once seen, the incentive to repeat it in theaters is minimal, especially knowing that it will be in streaming in 45 days. Reinvention is required. The cinema crisis is not a death sentence, but it is a demand for reinvention. Because the physical space of entertainment is not dying, it is being reformulated. The path that the music industry has followed by completely pivoting its business model with the disappearance of physical formats is the one that cinema has to follow. At the moment, theaters have not gotten the premium experiences right (sophisticated restoration, more comfortable rooms, improvements in image and sound quality), but that is because they still do not differentiate themselves enough from the domestic experience. Cinema needs its own Taylor … Read more

Spotify has suffered the largest music theft in history. One that confirms that most of their catalog is never heard

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Anna’s Archive was already known by literature lovers, who turned to this repository to be able to access books of all kinds without having to pay for them. Now they want to achieve the same thing with music, and they have taken a colossal and disturbing step: stealing practically the entire Spotify catalog. What is Anna’s Archive. Anna’s Archive project appeared on the scene in late 2022, shortly after legal pressure managed to knock down the Z-Library platformone of the largest websites for downloading free books. The platform works as a metasearch engine that allows you to find books and then download them. Anna’s Archive does not host these files—which, according to the project, exempts it from legal responsibility—and links to different anonymous download providers, which is where users can obtain them. Until now the platform focused on books, but that has changed. The biggest music theft in history. In a post published on his blog official this weekend, those responsible for Anna’s Archive indicated that they have made “a backup copy” of Spotify that includes both metadata and music files. Not only that: it is indicated that they are distributing all this information through torrent files, and the total download takes up 300 TB of data “grouped by popularity.” 86 million songs. They call it the first music “preservation archive” in history and it has 86 million music files. Although that figure is only 37% of the songs in Spotify’s entire catalog, according to Anna’s Archive they account for 99.6% of listening on Spotify. And here there are two important things: on the one hand, music as such. And on the other hand, the metadata that surrounds that music, and that offers very interesting information about Spotify’s music catalog. The top 10,000 popularity. Thus, at Anna’s Archive they wanted to organize that archive based on “popularity”, a metric that they use in Spotify to order the songs that are listened to the most and how recent those plays are. Those responsible for Anna’s Archive have compiled a gigantic list with the 10,000 most popular songs according to this metric. Lady Gaga, Bad Bunny and Billie Eilish occupy the top three positions, for example. This graph reveals how song popularity demonstrates the long tail phenomenon. Only 62 songs exceed 90 points. Three out of four songs are not heard. By grouping songs by popularity, the metadata reveals and confirms the traditional long tail phenomenon. More than 70% of the songs in the Spotify catalog are barely listened to (less than 1,000 plays), and there are so many that are popular or that they had to cut the gigantic file (it would have been 700 TB) to end that representation of 99.6% of songs that have minimal popularity on Spotify. That does not mean that they are better or worse, be careful: it just means that they have been heard more or less on the platform. We all hear (more or less) the same thing. Most listens come to songs with popularity between 50 and 80, and here comes an expected figure: of the 86 million songs, only 210,000 exceed 50 popularity (0.1%). Or what is the same: almost everyone basically listens to a very small set of songs compared to the size of the catalog. How much is each song listened to? Those responsible for Anna’s Archive claim that it is possible to estimate the total number of views per song thanks to popularity. They gave the example of the first three: ‘Die with a smile’ (Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars), 3,075 million views ‘Birds of a feather’ (Billie Eilish): 3,137 million views ‘DtMF’ (Bad Bunny): 1,124 million views Between the three of them they accumulate as many listens as the songs that are between number 20 and number 100 million have. Once again, the long tail in action. Analysis everywhere. These metadata are very useful, and Anna’s Archive has produced a unique report in which they reveal conclusions based on the data collected. Thus, you can confirm how the most common length of songs is around 3:30 minutes, how there are numerous duplicates per song (licenses, versions, etc.), which ones are the most popular genres between artists or how most of the songs on Spotify are singles, and not part of an album. These metadata are a true treasure for market researchers. Downloading (for now) only in large torrents. At Anna’s Archive they have not published almost any of the torrents so far, but they have already indicated how they will offer those 300 TB. First, the metadata in a 200 GB file, which is already being shared by about 200 people. Then the music in various batches organized by popularity. Finally, some additional metadata and content like album art designs. Time will tell if those 86 million songs end up being available on some type of platform that links them to download individually. At Anna’s Archive that does not seem to be the intention, at least for now, and at the moment the metasearch engine focuses strictly on books. What Spotify says. As they point out in TorrentFreakthose responsible for Spotify have launched an investigation, and as a result have “identified and deactivated the accounts of malicious users who were participating in illegal scraping activities.” They have also implemented new measures to prevent these types of attacks and “are monitoring suspicious behavior.” Image | Sumeet B In Xataka | The chaos of streaming is causing a phenomenon that we thought was in recession: downloads are increasing

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