Spotify has started a beta of "AI Credits", which lists AI contributions to a song inside the Song Credits panel of its mobile app. The feature surfaced quietly on an updated support page in April 2026. It depends entirely on disclosure: labels and distributors submit the information on behalf of artists who choose to share it, and according to Billboard the first to do so were DistroKid users. The move follows growing pressure on streaming services over the volume of AI-generated music reaching them.
The credits break AI use down by element, such as lyrics, vocals, instrumentals or production, and Spotify stresses that a credit describes a contribution rather than meaning the whole track was machine-made. It is equally clear about the reverse: no credit does not mean no AI, since not every distributor yet lets artists declare it. Spotify called the feature a first step rather than a full answer and said it is also working on a cross-industry labelling standard, running the two efforts in parallel because a complete system needs agreement across the business. Its stated near-term aim is to give artists who use AI creatively a way to tell listeners how.
That standard traces back to a September 2025 post in which Spotify said it was developing AI disclosure fields through the metadata body DDEX with distributors including DistroKid, CD Baby, Believe and EMPIRE. The same post said it had removed more than 75 million spam tracks over the previous year. Spotify updated it in April to announce the beta.
Rivals have taken different routes. Apple Music introduced Transparency Tags in March that labels and distributors can apply now and will eventually be required to use, though for the moment they are also self-reported. Apple's tags mark AI use in a material part of a recording or in the lyrics, among other cases. Deezer does not wait for disclosure and uses its own detector to flag fully AI tracks, of which it says about 75,000 arrive every day, or roughly 2.25 million a month.
Spotify's Sam Duboff had told Billboard's podcast in September that listening to AI music is still very low, which in his view gives artists time to decide how they want to use the tools, and that the company did not want to wait either. He said the starting point had to be shared language in the existing music supply chain, and that Spotify was not pretending to know where AI music would be in two or three years. Separately, Spotify said in October it was building AI music products with the three majors, Merlin and Believe, with artists able to choose whether to take part.
Sources · 1