By TheTrichordist | Spotify failed to consult any of the people who drive fans to the data abattoir: the musicians, artists, podcasters and authors. Spotify has quietly tightened the screws on AI this summer—while simultaneously clarifying how it uses your data to power its own machine learning features. For artists, rightsholders, developers, and policy folks, the combination matters: Spotify is making it harder for outsiders to train models on Spotify data, even as it codifies its own first party uses like AI DJ and personalized playlists.
Spotify is drawing a bright line: no training models on Spotify; yes to Spotify training its own. If you’re an artist or developer, that means stronger contractual leverage against third party scrapers—but also a need to sharpen your own data governance and licensing posture. Expect other platforms in music and podcasting to follow suit—and for regulators to ask tougher questions about how platform ML features are audited, licensed, and accounted for.
Below is a plain English (hopefully) breakdown of what changed, what’s new or newly explicit, and the practical implications for different stakeholders.
Spotify’s Ban on Certain AI Training Models
Go here to read more on this issue:
https://thetrichordist.com/2025/09/03/if-you-got-one-of-these-emails-from-spotify-you-might-be-interested/
[A version of this post first appeared on MusicTechPolicy]
The Trichordist © 2025.
[Our thanks to COMBO member Rob Roper for contributing this article: https://www.robroper.com]
If you got one of these emails from Spotify, you might be interested
