Entertainment Artists protested, AI flooded the ecosystem, and users bristled at the changes. Spotify made it through 2025 anyway, maintaining its status as a music streaming giant It’s Spotify Wrapped week, that time of the year when everyone gets on social media pretending to be shocked by their top artists and songs. 2025’s Wrapped landed with Listening Archive, a new feature that tracks a user’s daily habits and turns them into narrative-style reports powered by generative artificial intelligence (AI). Spotify has been threading AI through its products for years, but 2025 was the year that the technology made its way to the core of the streaming platform and the music industry as a whole. The company’s first major step into AI personalization came in 2023 with AI DJ, a synthetic host that curated and commented on listening sessions. In April 2024, Spotify released the beta feature AI Playlists, which lets users generate playlists from text prompts. Initially only available in the United Kingdom and Australia, the feature was rolled out to 40 other markets, including the Philippines, in April this year. In 2025, AI-generated music left the fringes of the internet. The Guardian reported in November that three AI-generated songs had made it to the Spotify charts amid the platform’s supposed crackdown on AI songs. Earlier, in September, Spotify announced that it had removed 75 million “spammy” tracks, calling the purge part of a broader effort to protect both artists and listeners from deceptive content. The issue isn’t limited to Spotify. In November, music streaming platform Deezer reported that 50,000 fully AI-generated songs were being uploaded to its platform every day. Deezer is currently the only major platform tagging music as AI-generated, while Spotify says it is working on developing AI disclosures in song credits. Entertainment An Industry Issue Paramore is signed to Atlantic Records, a label under Warner Music Group. Photo from Paramore/Instagram The influx of AI songs isn’t possible without tools to generate them with, and this year saw the rise of AI music generator tools like Suno and Udio. In June 2024, Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Universal Music Group (UMG) jointly sued the developers of both platforms for alleged copyright infringement. The complaint argued that Suno and Udio trained their systems on massive volumes of copyrighted recordings and were now producing music that would “directly compete with, cheapen, and ultimately drown out the genuine sound recordings on which [Suno and Udio] were built.” However, confrontation took a turn this November when Suno reached a $500-million settlement with Warner and entered a licensing agreement that allows users to pay to download AI-generated tracks built from Warner’s catalog, which includes music by artists such as Coldplay, Charli XCX, and Paramore. Warner has already dropped out of the lawsuit, but litigation by UMG and Sony is ongoing, Pitchfork reports. Between the licensing agreements and the lawsuit, generative AI has shown itself to be more than a passing experiment in the music industry, and something labels, platform developers, and artists must continue to navigate or contend with in the next few years. While no detailed statistics on Filipino Spotify users are publicly available, a Spotify Philippines report from 2024 illustrates the scale of the platform’s cultural reach: Pinoy music streams have quadrupled globally over the past five years, with global daily streams of Filipino tracks increasing dramatically over the same period. As AI tools such as Suno and Udio continue to flood charts with synthetic tracks, Filipino audiences could find local artists competing not just with global hits but with AI-generated music. Entertainment The Boycott Australian rock band King Gizzard & The Wizard Lizard is among other artists to ask their labels to pull their music out of the streaming giant in protest of its CEO’s investment in AI weapons. Photo from King Gizzard/Instagram Beyond the flood of synthetic tracks on streaming platforms, scrutiny landed on the Spotify CEO himself, Daniel Ek. In June, news broke that Ek’s venture capital firm Prima Materia invested in the German defense tech startup Helsing, which Ek also chairs. CNBC reports that Ek and Prima Materia led a €600-million funding round for the AI weapons firm. Instagram watchdog Zionists in Music asserts that one of Helsing’s investors, Swedish weapons manufacturer Saab, has provided radar systems to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), but no publicly available information substantiates this claim. Musicians who were already uneasy about AI music began to speak out. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Deerhoof, and Xiu Xiu are among other artists who publicly requested that their labels remove their music from Spotify, citing discomfort with the idea that fan subscriptions could indirectly support technologies used in warfare. Helsing has said its systems are deployed only in Europe for defense against Russian aggression, but for many artists, the optics mattered as much as the facts. The boycott hasn’t visibly dented Spotify’s user numbers yet, with over 696 million users worldwide and 276 million paying for premium features. For Filipino listeners, however, the impact is harder to gauge, due to the lack of available data on the platform’s Filipino users. Spotify has cultivated a decade-long presence in the country, shaping how local audiences discover and engage with music. While Deezer’s AI tags and Apple Music’s playlist import tool may appeal to users dissatisfied with Spotify elsewhere, the latter feature is not yet available in the Philippines, limiting practical alternatives for local listeners. Still, based on the sheer volume of people posting about their Spotify Wrapped this week, the controversies haven’t slowed the platform’s cultural footprint. For better or for worse, Spotify is here to stay. From Rolling Stone Philippines. Read More