The same people who read AI-generated stories about AI. Which is, roughly, most of us. There are AI-generated blog posts on the front page of HN multiple times a day. Right now, I see "I prompted ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini and watched my Nginx logs", which is AI slop. I'm sure there's more.
Well, even if you are absolutely deliberate against AI slop like me, you might well just fall asleep listening to an ambient album of your top rated human musician, and wake up to AI slop anyway in an hour or two in which your subscription money had been paying those fuckers' instant ramen.
But this can be easily fixed by turning the autoplay, the slop's best friend, off.
Me personally, I sniff AI on Spotify by empty "about" sections. Which is sad as I always held dear that it's the music that must speak for the author, not the vice versa.
The solution is easy, don’t use Spotify.
They are money grubbing vampires leeching off musicians anyway and using your subscription money to fund shady arms companies.
Lots of people are listening to it. There’s an AI brand named “Eddie Dalton” on Spotify right now with 589k monthly listeners and a couple of million streams on its top track. This is one of many.
Lots of people don’t care about whether the music they listen to is human created or not - just as lots of people don’t care about lots of other AI slop so long as they are entertained by it.
The biggest issue for new musicians is getting people’s attention. AI music that people are happy to over human music listen to is absolutely part of the problem.
I agree that this is the biggest problem, but the existing backlog of hits is far that have been recorded since way before I was born is far “worse” in that regard than AI slop.
It’s easy (at least for now) to compete with slop - it’s way harder to compete with e.g. Queen, Eminem and the Beatles.
It’s like saying cancer is a problem when you’re bleeding from a gunshot wound to your chest.
The engagement mechanisms and audiences for heritage artists vs new artists are very different. New artists are not in competition with heritage artists like the ones you mention: those artists are a constant passive consumption baseline against which new active “lean in” consumption needs to fit. A lot of music listening is passive consumption. Start an algorithmically generated “radio” style playlist from one of those big name heritage artists and Spotify will then serve up payola content (baked in in the major label deals, “Spotify Discovery Mode” for indies) that positions new music within that playlist for algorithmically receptive listeners. If AI created music is going head to head in that algorithmic market for listening slots, that has a significant disadvantage for new human-created music.
Big name heritage artists aren’t the problem - they are the thing that underpins a lot of consumption and keeps people coming back to platform.
