This week Spotify forecast slowing revenue and user growth. Wall Street was not happy and drove the stock down 13.4%. The news that Spotify shared for Artists was more concerning.
250 Million Tracks
During a call with investors Spotify revealed that its catalog had ballooned to 250 million. That's 2.5 times recent official Spotify track counts of 100 million.
The driver of that growth is AI. The "generative market" said Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström creates "new music, which is happening at scale and quickly increasing the catalog... it's going to keep increasing."
That's a depressing prospect for independent musicians and labels trying to stand out against more than twice the number of tracks than just a year ago.
While AI is a real problem for real musicians, Spotify believes that AI is also the only solution.
+Read more: "Music & AI: What Happens When Quality Is No Longer a Differentiator?"
Generative Music Making
Spotify's solution to AI slop is not about its limited efforts to police new music including the recent addition of 'voluntary' labeling.
The solution, says Spotify, is more music from existing creators.
"Many creators are using AI to make new music. Existing creators cannot join," said Söderström, "That's because the copyright problem is much more complicated to solve well, and the attribution problem of who should get paid what is much harder."
"That's the problem we want to go after," continued the co-CEO. "We want to take this opportunity to existing creators as well with derivatives of existing IP. As I've said before, we have the capabilities and technologies we need."
"We are the right company to solve this problem, and we think that existing creators should participate in AI just as well as new creators.
Hypebot's Bottom Line
When does at scale become out of control?
If the solution to AI slop is simply more AI music from existing artists, the 250 million track milestone is only the beginning.
As the catalog balloons at an exponential rate, the industry is left wondering: at what point does "at scale" become "out of control"?
Spotify’s vision of a marketplace built on derivatives and IP-remixes might solve the "copyright problem," but it doesn’t solve the visibility problem for the millions of artists already struggling to be heard.
Whether this "derivative" future will actually rescue artist payouts or simply accelerate the dilution of the 250-million-track sea remains the $11 billion question for 2026.
