Spotify announces new AI policies to crackdown on deepfakes, misleading content

In a blog post, the company said, “AI technology is evolving fast, and we’ll continue to roll out new policies frequently. Here is where we are focusing our policy work today: Improved enforcement of impersonation violations; A new spam filtering system; AI disclosures for music with industry-standard credits…We’ve introduced a new impersonation policy that clarifies how we handle claims about AI voice clones, giving artists stronger protections and clearer recourse. Vocal impersonation is only allowed in music on Spotify (SPOT) when the impersonated artist has authorized the usage. We’re also ramping up our investments to protect against another impersonation tactic-where uploaders fraudulently deliver music to another artist’s profile across streaming services. We’re testing new prevention tactics with leading artist distributors to equip them to better stop these attacks at the source. On our end, we’ll also be investing more resources into our content mismatch process, reducing the wait time for review, and enabling artists to report “mismatch” even in the pre-release state…This fall, we’ll roll out a new music spam filter-a system that will identify uploaders and tracks engaging in these tactics, tag them, and stop recommending them. 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…We’re helping develop and will support the new industry standard for AI disclosures in music credits, developed through DDEX. As this information is submitted through labels, distributors, and music partners, we’ll begin displaying it across the app. This standard gives artists and rights holders a way to clearly indicate where and how AI played a role in the creation of a track-whether that’s AI-generated vocals, instrumentation, or post-production. This change is about strengthening trust across the platform. It’s not about punishing artists who use AI responsibly or down-ranking tracks for disclosing information about how they were made.”