Last year, researchers found thousands of AI-generated tracks on Spotify racking up millions of streams, just soulless noise farmed by bots to collect royalties. That's not a glitch — that's the direct result of letting these songs onto platforms.
Here's the cascade: the moment streaming services accept AI music at scale, the economics flip. Streaming royalties are a fixed pie, so every AI track eats a slice from a human artist. As real musicians see their payouts shrink, they're pushed to either quit or start generating, too. Suddenly platforms drown in synthetic content, algorithms prioritize volume over craft, and listeners stop trusting recommendations entirely. Then labels pull back from developing actual talent because why invest in humans when you can generate infinite content for free?
The feedback loop is brutal. Once you let the firehose in, human music doesn't just compete — it suffocates. The gatekeeping isn't perfect, but it's the only thing keeping the ecosystem alive.