In the age where that artist in your playlist might have literally been “born” yesterday, listeners want assurances that the art they’re consuming was human-made. Spotify, on a winding journey to rooting out AI ‘music’ on the platform, has rolled out a new music approval system called Artist Profile Protection. It joins a new beta feature, SongDNA, which was built to help users rise above the ever-rising tide of AI slop plaguing the service.
Baked into your SongDNA
The feature, announced yesterday, is essentially a family tree (or web) for your favourite tracks, showing who wrote, produced, or had any other hand in the track’s creation. Spotify throws it all together using data gathered by the artists, and “supplemented by community-sourced data.”
“SongDNA is designed to make a song’s creative lineage more transparent so fans can easily explore the people and influences behind the music they love,” said Jacqueline Ankner, Spotify’s head of songwriter & publisher partnerships.
The feature is still in beta, and won’t appear on every track right off the bat. Spotify’s example involved Kendrick Lamar’s luther, showing off SZA as the track’s main feature artist, Sam Dew as an additional vocalist, etc. The little bubbles that spawn are all clickable, expanding a featured or sampled artist’s reach.
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The feature began rolling out yesterday to both Android and iOS users, though the feature has yet to hit Stuff’s Android device at the time of writing. Although the feature has already hit some devices, the rest of us will likely be waiting until April. When it arrives, only those Premium subscribers will get access.
As for Artist Profile Protection, users will never see the intricacies of the feature, but the results will hopefully speak for themselves. The idea is to give artists more control over the music that appears under their profile. Why that wasn’t already the case, we couldn’t tell you. But it’s a step in the right direction, one that’ll hopefully stem the flow of AI slop infecting your Discover Weekly playlists. The feature is still opt-in for artists, though.
“Music has been landing on the wrong artist pages across streaming services, and the rise of easy-to-produce AI tracks has made the problem worse,” Spotify said in its announcement. “That’s not the experience we want artists to have on Spotify, and that’s why we’ve made protecting artist identity a top priority for 2026.”
