Verified by Spotify: New No AI badge— it appears for creators with steady listener activity, clean platform records, and real-world proof like live shows or merch drops

Step 1) create an unnecessary problem

Step 2) solve said problem

Step 3) profit???

Go fuck yourselves Spotify

Or just don't use Spotify

Spotify? the company that ran ICE ads?

Picked up a dedicated audio device recently (with another few on the way!), and it feels nice to curate my own offline, add-free, algorithm-free listening experience. Having music myself his been half the fun of this, I won't be using any streaming app going forward.

It is also super adorable:

Wtf?? They made tons of the AI slop on their themselves!

So what happens if the artist is dead?

Freddie Mercury would find it difficult to maintain an active social nedia presence to prove he's human, being rather indisposed at the present.

And in dark mmo world, soon there will be service to buy "Verified by Spotify" badge or account.

Spotify is such a shit company. I used to get paid (peanuts) on my artist account but they raised the threshold for getting payouts so now I get nothing.

Wonder if this will work on the innumerable obvious covers of popular songs by no-name bands which get listed as being from the original artists. Probably not, which is why I stopped using Spotify even before so many of their other shitty moves.

I don't even begin to trust Spotify to tell me which sponsored Spotify content is only algorithmically served to me by Spotify AI, not created with it.

Too little too late

I don't get the appeal of Spotify. Pay monthly for music? That's crazy.

And with Artist Profile Protection (currently in beta), artists now have greater control over what appears on their profile, which helps to ensure the music you see is coming from them.

From the Artist Profile Protection link:

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. 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. Today, we’re announcing a first-of-its-kind solution to a problem that’s affected streaming for years.

How the hell is that something that is only in beta in 2026 and not a standard feature? It's currently optional, but they better automatically opt in verified "No AI" artists if the label is going to be worth anything. There should not be AI-generated songs from randos getting attached to a "No AI" artist.

I'll never understand Spotify. If it's such a pain in the ass why do people use it? Napster was big when I was in high school so if I find a song I like, I go download it. Sometimes it's piracy. Sometimes it's a legitimate purchase. Whichever is easiest.

Done. The end. It's mine forever.

As far as discoverability goes it helps that there have been no new music releases in the past couple of decades that I care about.

Interested in seeing how this will be gamed

In the same breath that Spotify uses to introduce Ai stuff they also introduce a prompt based Ai to create playlists. I wish there were more platforms with feature parity and that it were easier to transfer preferences and genre tastes to other platforms.

I've tried deezer briefly but it is just missing so many things that I like that Spotify has.

Yet another platform with meaningless badges