Source: The Verge
Spotify is introducing verified badges for artists—a tacit admission that AI-generated music spam has become material enough to require visible gatekeeping. The move shifts verification from a status symbol into a functional filter for consumer discovery, potentially bifurcating Spotify's catalog into trusted and unvetted tiers. It also signals economic pressure: if Spotify needed to distinguish human artists from AI-generated content this explicitly, AI music production has already eroded enough catalog quality or streamed volume to threaten the platform's core value proposition as a discovery engine.