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Created December 9, 2025 12:12
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LinkedIn Post - 2025-12-09 07:12
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ai-can-spit-out-10000-songs-before-lunch-so-why-doesnt-your-discover-weekly-s.md

AI can spit out 10,000 songs before lunch. So why doesn’t your Discover Weekly sound like a garbage disposal? 🎧

My AI research agent pulled the receipts, and the pattern is boring in the best way - the money pipe is guarded.

The majors don’t let you upload at scale. There is no public upload API for Spotify, Apple, or the rest. Spotify even tried direct uploads and killed the experiment in 2019. If you want in, you go through distributors like DistroKid or TuneCore. That means ID checks, payment setup, metadata sanity checks, and a human who can say no. Bots hate paperwork.

Even if you slip through, Spotify watches behavior after the fact. Artificial streaming - click farms, loops, playlist stuffing - gets flagged. They added a 1,000-streams-in-12-months threshold before a track earns recorded royalties, and they can claw back, demonetize, or delist. Remember when a chunk of Boomy tracks disappeared for suspected manipulation? That wasn’t a glitch - that was the system working.

Then there’s ownership. Platforms don’t care if you used a Strat, a DAW, or a model. They care that you own the master and didn’t clone a protected voice or melody. Fail that, and your payout turns to dust.

And the math is brutal. A stream pays fractions of a cent. A million plays is a few thousand dollars before fees and taxes. Dumping 10,000 lazy tracks does not print money. Discovery still runs on taste, brand, and community - not on file count.

Yes, there are upload APIs - on YouTube, SoundCloud, TikTok. Different game. That’s ad money and exposure, not classic streaming royalties. You can automate posts there, but the pay mechanics don’t encourage sludge at industrial scale.

Caveat time: these guardrails miss. Junk gets through. Real artists get caught in the net. Policies move. Deezer’s artist-centric push against “noise” helps, but drawing the line is messy, and headline numbers about mass takedowns are just that - headlines.

The truth is simple: generation is easy, distribution is throttled, monetization is guarded. That’s why your headphones aren’t full of AI slop. Not because AI is weak - because the gates are locked. 🔒

If Spotify reopened direct uploads tomorrow, what breaks first - curation or your patience?

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