Spotify has officially begun rolling out a wider beta of a major new feature called Artist Profile Protection this week.
The move comes as the “AI songs” problem has become a nightmare for the music industry – deepfakes, like the infamous fake Drake track, and other “AI slop” have been flooding the platform, often uploaded to real artists’ profiles to steal royalties or confuse fans.
Here’s how the feature works and why it could be a game-changer.
First, there’s the “Gatekeeper” system. Previously, if a distributor sent a song to Spotify with “Taylor Swift” in the metadata, it would often appear automatically on her profile.
Now, artists who opt in get a Review and Approve dashboard. Whenever a new track is delivered, they (or their team) receive a notification and have to manually approve it before it goes live.
If they don’t recognize the song – whether it’s an AI deepfake or a metadata error – they can reject it, or simply ignore it, and it won’t be linked to their identity.
To speed up legitimate releases, Spotify has also introduced an “Artist Key”, a unique digital code for each artist.
Trusted labels or distributors can use the key to bypass manual review, so approved tracks go live instantly.
Without it, any “bad actor” trying to upload an AI song under that artist’s name will get stuck in the waiting room.
Spotify has already removed over 75 million “spammy tracks” in the past year alone.
This feature marks a shift from reacting to the problem – taking down songs after fans complain – to preventing them from ever reaching an artist’s profile in the first place.
For listeners, this means greater trust: when you see a new release from your favourite artist, you can be much more confident it’s actually them and not a computer-generated mimic.
It also keeps your playlists cleaner, preventing AI-generated noise from polluting your Release Radar and Discover Weekly recommendations.
