Spotify launches ‘Verified’ badge as AI fuels streaming concerns
Global music streaming platform Spotify announced and launched ‘Verified by Spotify’ on the 30th April, a ‘signal of authenticity’ to distinguish human artists from AI music profiles in response to growing concern over AI’s place in streaming.
The company aims to ‘improve listener transparency’ on its platform.
Verification will take place in the form of a green checkmark on human profiles, determined by Spotify’s own criteria and is subject to human review. The rise of AI-generated music has flooded streaming platforms with listeners concerned that Spotify in particular has not done enough to combat its occurrence.
In the blog post announcing its implementation, the conditions for verification are outlined as ‘consistent listener activity and engagement, good standing with Spotify’s platform policies and signals of a real artist’.
The addition to artist profiles comes as a response to growing concern from users that AI is becoming unrecognisable in music as well as in a wider societal context. A user on Spotify’s community forum expressed their wish to leave the platform due to CEO Daniel Ek’s investment of €600 million into an AI military startup (Financial Times, 2025), stating “Spotify didn’t pay its artists enough” to warrant its ‘sufficient’ profits instead being used to “create machines of war”.
Another streaming platform, Deezer, has also taken action against the spread of AI music. The company announced on April 20th that nearly 75,000 AI tracks are being uploaded daily, yet they are actively removing them from user recommendations and has stopped storing high resolution versions of the songs. They confirmed that the consumption of these tracks are between 1-3% of total streams due to their regulations and a majority of these are being demonetised, helping to keep revenue going to human artists. Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier credits their patent-pending AI detection technology for reducing “AI-related fraud and payment dilution”, contrasting Spotify’s new human-reviewed and judged approach to tackling the rise of AI in streaming.
Are We Human, or Are We Dance-AI?: The Threat of AI and What Spotify Is (Not) Doing About It
Musicians used to worry predominantly about sustaining a career in an increasingly oversaturated market of like-minded artists and ‘industry plants’. Now, a new threat has struck the music industry – the growing concern of artificial intelligence. Spotify have recently introduced ‘Verified by Spotify’, a badge on artist profiles to confirm they are, indeed, human.
The company claims the introduction of this system will improve “listener transparency’ after social criticism of AI has skyrocketed due to an increase of non-human music being released on streaming platforms and gaining traction across social media sites such as TikTok. Artists now have to meet a set of requirements in order to be considered verified. These are listed on Spotify’s blog post introducing the new change to the platform, being named as ‘consistent listener activity, good standing with Spotify’s policies and signals of a real artist’. The final decision for whether an artist be verified is subject to human review and judgement. However, the implementation of the badge raises concerns over how fast the progression of AI is moving and the effect that this has on the listener.
One of the biggest concerns amongst listeners is the maintaining of authenticity in the music they listen to. In one case, artist Jorja Smith’s label FAMM believes the track ‘I Run’ by HAVEN used an AI trained on her voice for its vocal line. The person behind the track, Harrison Walker, used Smith’s name in hashtags to promote it and gain traction across social media, with it being due for charting and radio play. The vocal has since been changed, but FAMM’s statement posted to Instagram highlighted that the growing rate of AI usage is ‘substantially outpacing regulation’. This leads the public to question whether Spotify is doing enough to maintain human artist’s authenticity the way it intends to.
Spotify’s verification can also be seen as a way to only appease users of the platform that are losing faith in the authenticity of music. CEO Daniel Ek has made headlines in recent years by investing €600 million into an AI military company, Helsing, that he is also chairman of (The Guardian, 2025). This led many popular artists to remove their music from the streaming service, such as Massive Attack who said “the hard-earned money of fans and the creative endeavours of musicians ultimately funds lethal, dystopian technologies”. Regardless of the company’s claims to “make it easier” for listeners to trust that they are listening to human artistry, Ek’s actions as CEO directly contest this regulation of AI in a wider societal context.
The problem here does not necessarily pertain to artificial intelligence, as technology has pioneered the way that music is made and listened to today – but it has always been made authentically by humans. This era of uncertainty can be largely attributed to the fast-paced nature of AI and that large corporations are seemingly not doing enough to stop this from hurting both artists and audiences.
James Morriss, drummer of Oxford Comma: ‘I wanna be the person that makes you feel something’
1I met James Morriss in the slap-dash studio of our university house, the bedroom of one of our housemates with an unmade mattress leant against the wall and a remarkable collection of recording equipment; a set of Genelec speakers, a Neumann microphone hoisted mid-air and every red, black and bright green wire you could imagine strewn across the desk and floor. The other option was to sit in Morriss’ room, but we’d agreed prior that his drum kit – also in place of a bed – would make for a less-than ideal seating arrangement for us both, as well as agreeing to keep our conversation focused on himself as the drummer of Leeds-based rock band Oxford Comma and not as a longtime friend of mine.
Morriss sat on a plastic chair with a slight smile on his face. Our introduction was not that of two people who had known each other for almost five years, it was awkward as I asked my first question about something we generally don’t talk about together. I wanted to know how he was feeling in the lead up to the release of Oxford Comma’s second ever release, Narcissist. His smile widened as he began with “Quite happy actually,” as he went on to say the band had “sat on this song for nearly two years.” He told me that the song was written in November of 2024, and they had re-recorded it twice due to being unsatisfied with the project. “I actually quite like listening to our songs outside of a performing context… like in my car” He said to my surprise, but it’s understandable why he would expect himself to not want to listen to the song after the time it has taken them to finish it.
Morriss told me the singer of their band writes the lyrics to their songs, stating “I’m not a lyric writer, and I’ve never tried”, but he enjoys being involved in the arrangement of the songs. He went on to say “As a drummer, structurally and rhythmically, they’re the parts I have the most input in.”, and it made me wonder how he came to be such a prolific instrumentalist. He told me the story of how he came to start drumming and chronicled his childhood years of gaining different drum kits from the ages of 3 to 10, by then he had taught himself by playing to his favourite songs. Leeds Festival came up in our conversation many times, the place where he decided he wanted this to be his career. Seeing the drummers of the bands who taught him about his talent made him think “that’s really cool, I wanna do that, I wanna be the person who makes you feel a certain way when they play something.”. He laughed like he expected me to do the same when he said he had always wanted to perform, saying “when I was six, I wanted to be an actor.” The list of drummers he named as his favourites made sense to me after this, who all had a theatrical element to their playing. He spoke earnestly of George Daniel from The 1975 – who he’s seen at Leeds Festival three times – and of his ‘minimalist’ approach to drumming that inspires him, alongside Ben Thatcher of Royal Blood and Josh Dunn of Twenty One Pilots.
Oxford Comma met at Leeds Conservatoire, where they all are close to finishing their final year. The audition process was simple for Morriss, who left his calm demeanor to let off a self-effacing laugh when he told me the other members said “they were gonna bin off asking anyone else [because] they really liked me.”, and described the band as a ‘family’. “I heard someone go ‘It’s Oxford Comma’… In my mind it’s not a big deal, these are just my friends.’ he said, also adding that people tell him “you guys are like a real band”. That phrase stuck out to me, and he elaborated with it meaning “Someone who creates really good music, this makes me sound like a narcissist, which comes out next week” as he pointed at me humorously to emphasise his unintentional pun.
“I’m incredibly surprised” was Morriss’ response to me asking about the response to Oxford Comma’s first single, Fake Fancy Shoes, “It’s so weird we only have 1 song out, because off the back of this we’ve sold out 2 shows across the country and signed a distribution deal with a major record label”. The joy this brung him was clear and he spoke of the great achievements the band had under their belt so early on in their careers.
The love that James Morriss has towards drumming, his band and life in general was evident throughout our conversation. Morriss sums up the ethos of Oxford Comma plainly: “We just wanna be really good.” I asked what he could reveal about the band’s first EP titled Tether, and he nervously laughed after saying,
“The song ‘Tether’ comes out in May, maybe don’t write this stuff down”.
TONII Review: A dopamine-flooded underwater escape straight from year 3000
No one in Leeds is doing pop quite like this trio.
2My evening on the 19th February was spent in the dark, dingy cellar of Hyde Park Book Club to watch a truly electrifying performance by soon-to-be Leeds Conservatoire alum TONII, an experimental electro-pop artist characterised by her world of frutiger aero visuals, soundscapes and the occasional chipmunk vocal effect.
The show TONII and her team of university students put on was a testament to the young and vibrant Leeds music scene. The stage was backed by custom projections featuring lyrics from tracks on the setlist and a live-feed of the performance on stage. Lead singer Toni was accompanied by her band, Lucas Heasman on percussion via drum loops and pads (the most wires I’ve seen in my life and completely on-brand) and Oliver Illingworth on guitar, who added a refreshing element of realism to TONII’s other-worldly tracks.
There were moments throughout where Toni would address the crowd to explain her calculated and at times curious hand movements, such as raising her outfacing palm towards the audience while singing to a chorus of layered vocal effects. She explained she uses the program TouchDesigner to mimic Imogen Heap’s experimental-pop pioneering MiMU gloves that add different effects to her vocals (including crowd-favourite chipmunk vocal effect). This live vocal production was fascinating to watch and had the packed room captivated.
Throughout the set were a number of unreleased tracks that Toni said she was planning on releasing in the upcoming year. The set also featured an electro-pop cover of Prince & The Revolutions’ ‘I Would Die 4 U’. The gig was used as promotional material for her most recent single ‘d0pamine’, released 2 days prior to the event. The track was met by huge applause and audience members to the front screaming the words back to her – these must’ve been friends, or die-hard fans, as the bass in the room was definitely enough to rupture some fragile eardrums, nevermind make some lyrics inaudible.
However, it was clear the free earbuds at the box office upstairs went to good use as the crowd were enthusiastically chanting for the trio to play TONII’s newest single again for the encore, and it was even better the second time, potentially improved by the presence of Heasman’s mum on stage dancing with a fish hat engulfing her head.
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