Spotify has spent the past year telling artists it is keeping AI slop and spam out of listeners’ recommendations. Now a label founder says the same crackdown may be catching real music too. On Tuesday 3 November 2026, Digital Music News reported claims from Austin Staubus, founder of the company 11A, that follower growth has declined across 50 major user-made Spotify playlists his company monitors, all of them independently rated as free of bots.
Staubus says none of the recordings on those playlists are AI-generated, and he is asking whether changes to Spotify’s anti-spam systems are suppressing legitimate musicians. Spotify has not publicly linked its systems to the drop, and DMN’s report did not include a response from the company. Here is what has been claimed, what Spotify has said about how its filters work, and why it matters for anyone releasing music, AI-made or not.
What 11A says it found
According to Digital Music News, Staubus raised the issue in an email to the publication and discussed it in a recent YouTube interview with music marketer Andrew Southworth. His company tracks 50 major user-generated playlists. Follower growth has declined across all of them, he says, and 22 have seen reversals or outright follower losses. He says he noticed the changes beginning on 31 August 2026.
All 50 playlists were classified as “Likely Bot-Free” by the analytics service Artist.Tools, DMN reports. That matters because fake streams and bot-driven playlists are exactly what Spotify’s systems are designed to catch. If the playlists are genuinely clean, a sudden slowdown would point to something else.
In the interview, Staubus said he had seen evidence that an unnamed Spotify executive confirmed in writing that the spam filter “is making inferences on user playlists and the content inside them and based on those inferences, [Spotify] is deciding to either rank them or recommend them.” That evidence has not been published, and Spotify has not commented on it publicly.
User playlists, from my perspective, are one of the biggest differentiating factors between Spotify and other DSPs. … They’ve got high retention, so that’s what makes it surprising that Spotify is just all of a sudden like turning off searchability for so many great user playlists. — Austin Staubus, in an interview with Andrew Southworth, as quoted by Digital Music News
What hasn’t been shown
Digital Music News is careful to say the evidence is not conclusive. “While it’s difficult to ascertain whether changes to Spotify’s systems are to blame, the timing is apt,” the publication wrote. It also cautioned that slower follower growth and follower losses “do not necessarily prove” that Spotify’s system is keeping legitimate user playlists from being recommended, and that Spotify’s track-level recommendation filter and the playlist-level changes being alleged may not stem from the same issue.
In other words, this is one company’s data, from 50 playlists, describing a trend that could have more than one cause. It is a question worth asking, not a finding. Staubus says the issue raises questions about financial consequences for independent labels, artists, publishers and songwriters, and DMN says the matter “hinges on what Spotify has to say”.
What Spotify says its filters do
Spotify first announced its music spam filter on 25 September 2025. In that announcement, it said spam tactics such as “mass uploads, duplicates, SEO hacks, artificially short track abuse, and other forms of slop” had become easier to exploit as AI tools made it simpler to generate large volumes of music. The filter would identify uploaders and tracks engaging in those tactics, tag them and stop recommending them.
Spotify acknowledged the risk of getting it wrong from the start. “We want to be careful to ensure we’re not penalizing the wrong uploaders, so we’ll be rolling the system out conservatively over the coming months and continue to add new signals to the system as new schemes emerge,” the company said.
In a one-year update published on 20 October 2026, Spotify said it had taken more than 50 million slop and spam tracks out of recommendations so far this year, on top of more than 75 million spammy tracks removed from the platform altogether. It said “no single signal” catches slop or spam on its own, so it combines listener engagement and feedback, upload patterns, metadata and information from multiple third-party AI detection tools, adding that “AI detection technology in particular has limitations”. The list of tactics it now hunts includes “spammy playlist networks”. We covered that update in Spotify Pulls 50M AI Slop Tracks From Recommendations.
Why it matters
For independent artists and curators
User playlists are one of the main ways independent music gets found on Spotify without a label pitch. If clean, human-curated playlists are being swept up by systems built to catch spam networks, independent artists lose a discovery route they do not control. If they are not, the claim still shows how little visibility artists and curators have into why reach rises or falls. Either way, clearer explanations from Spotify would help.
For AI music creators
The pressure on mass-produced AI music is coming from every direction. Spotify says tracks with a high probability of being AI-generated are 10 times more likely to fall below its 1,000-stream royalty threshold, and that AI Persona artist profiles are excluded from recommendations by default unless a listener follows them. Universal Music’s chief executive wants AI slop paid differently from human music, as we reported in Universal Music: AI Slop Shouldn’t Be Paid Like Real Music, and Deezer is giving listeners a switch to hide fully AI-generated tracks, covered in Deezer Will Let Users Block Fully AI-Generated Music.
For creators who use AI as a tool and release music carefully, the signals Spotify describes are worth knowing. Its filters look at behaviour, such as upload volume, duplicates, metadata and how listeners respond, as well as AI detection. Spotify has said its AI Credits disclosure, built on an industry standard developed through DDEX, is “not about punishing artists who use AI responsibly or down-ranking tracks for disclosing information about how they were made.”
For listeners in Australia and worldwide
Spotify has not described its spam filter or recommendation changes as limited to particular countries, so any overcorrection, or any fix, would matter to Australian artists and playlist curators as much as to those in the US. The concern Staubus raises is about search and recommendations, not playlists being deleted.
What happens next
Watch for a response from Spotify, independent data from other playlist curators or analytics services, and any changes to how Spotify explains ranking decisions to artists. Spotify says Artist Profile Protection, which lets artists review releases that list them before they appear on their profile, will be available to all artists by the end of 2026. Dizy will keep tracking how streaming services draw the line between AI spam and real music.
Following AI music on Dizy
Dizy charts original tracks, and artists declare whether a track is AI-assisted or AI-generated when they submit. See the Top 100 and New releases, browse AI artists, or submit your track. For a guide to reading the numbers, see How to Read AI Music Charts Like a Cultural Top 40.
Sources
Spotify Newsroom: One Year In: Putting Human Artistry First on Spotify (20 October 2026)
