The internet is drowning in slop. From trampoline-jumping bunnies to “shrimp Jesus” — a bizarre genre that melds religious images with the body of crustaceans — social media feeds abound with mindless text, videos and images generated by artificial intelligence. But cover your ears, because the same might soon be true for music playlists.

Spotify, which claims about 700mn monthly active users, said it was forced to remove 75mn “spammy” AI-generated tracks from its platform amid a surge over the past 12 months. At French streaming service Deezer, over 28 per cent of the tracks uploaded to its platform each day are generated by AI, up from just 10 per cent in January. 

This marks an evolution in the ways in which technology is affecting the music industry. In the past, it was used to cheat the streaming algorithms. Scammers would upload a small number of tracks to music platforms and have automated bots play the content repeatedly to generate royalty payments. But this was easy to detect.