Spotify Now Features AI Band Clones

Is Spotify "featuring" the AI band clone, or did they just put it on their platform because some opportunist uploaded it to CDBaby / DistroKid / some other music distribution service? Feels like we're trying to make a headline about Spotify when something much more mundane is happening.

Maybe the headline is that there is absolutely no curation happening, so if KGATLW remove their music from Spotify, you can probably get a few streams from unwary listeners by uploading song covers under a similar moniker. This has been happening forever though--lots of people identify music that isn't on Spotify and then release their own covers to try to capitalize on the vacuum (this is especially common with video game and anime music, which doesn't always have a label release).

Not that Spotify is innocent of all wrongdoing. I don't know how if this has been proven but there is theorizing that Spotify loads their own featured playlists (specifically ones like 'ambient study music' which people might consider to be fungible) with bogus, probably-AI 'artists' who don't need to get paid at all.

I'd prefer if Spotify just labelled AI-generated music. They already label all explicit songs with the boxed E so a boxed AI would work well. They'll need to anyway to comply with the EU AI Act: Section 4, if I'm reading it correctly, in force August 2026: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/