Headline misleading. Makes it sound like this is a problem that they are just getting around to fixing. Reality is this is an intentional business decision that has made them tons of money and they are now publicly claiming to address it when their subscribers are sick of listening to AI slop.
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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Read: "Of course we knew about it, we started it. But the bad publicity was becoming a problem so we do it less now and present it so we look like the defender of true art."
Ding, videos and articles showcasing it must have become popular all of a sudden.
Buy music directly from artists. Plenty of them sell their tracks online.
You can also use programs like Nicotine+ to download music for free.
Can't recommend Bandcamp fridays enough.
That requires you to buy all your music though, for those (like me) that own basically nothing, it's crazy to change.
They need to force the free streaming of owned tracks or something. Qobuz allows this I think, but only if you buy through them.
Bandcamp even allows free streaming when you don't own the music. But the player sucks
Host a Navidrome server in docker to stream it.
I host one for VGM since that isn't on any streaming site. Going strong for two years.
With "regular" music though losing the discover ability would really suck :/
I use navidrome and scrobble to listenbrainz. That gives some discoverability. I think last.fm is also supported
Guessing advertisers didn't want to spend money putting up ads for bots and told Spotify to do something about it.
Ok now stop paying Joe Rogan a billion dollars a year, and then I’d consider coming back.
And stop injecting extra ads into podcasts for subscribers
Yeah, you’re right. I would still never consider going back. Evil fucks
At this point, that wouldn't be enough. They'd need a better CEO at the very least
Hatsune Miku sweating bullets all of a sudden.
Real talk though, there’s a whole genre of non-slop vocaloid music that these policies might affect, if I’m reading the rules strictly.
Yeah, I really wonder where Synth V created songs will fall under this rule, cause even though the VAs were paid and it still requires good tuning, they're technically AI... Maybe the older songs and the new popular songs will be fine due to having recognition, but any new small time producers are gonna suffer if they've got boys doing the checking.
I don't use Spotify, but I assume they do know Vocaloid (and Miku) exists right? At least YT music has a recommended playlist for vocaloid songs anyway.
Edit: I know that Miku isn't AI, and I'd never call her + the others AI. But Krypton has given Miku and the others AI voicebanks recently (although I heard the aren't that good) and Synth V is getting more popular (Teto, Yi Xi, Elanor Forte, etc.). Hell, there are some Synth V songs that I've heard that I thought were real people...
But I'm worried about those who don't know this info just doing a blanket "no robots/no AI" and nuking Vocaloid/V Synth songs
Miku is more of an instrument, it's why only musicians used it compared to AI slop.
That's an issue with how AI is defined though isn't it? A decade ago, no one would have counted Miku as AI. It's just that marketing teams and the media has abused the term that now almost any algorithm can be termed AI even if it never utilizes any mechanism that would be under the umbrella of the academics' definition of AI.
Yeah, everyone has slapped AI on everything and it sucks. What's unfortunate is Krypton's v6 (2022) editions include some AI voicebanks that are apparently mid, they make stuff sound more natural but don't help tuning that much. The singers were properly paid, but outsiders aren't gonna know that and will assume, "oh it's just like all the other techbro nonsense."
Basically anything pre-2022 is fine historically, Krypton literally didn't have AI voice banks anyway and everyone in the fandom already knew you had to put effort into making a song with a Vocaloid, as they're literally synths. But now more and more people are discovering the fandom without knowing the history, and if the first thing they see is "Look, we have AI now!", not realizing that it's only for naturalization/minor tuning and not "make me a song", they'll just throw it in the same pile.
Already dropped them.
Too. Fucking. Late.