Spotify Has an AI Problem, Dallas Artists Are First to Be Flagged and Taken Down

There are plenty of good reasons to listen to Katherine Paterson’s “Artemis.” The soft fingerstyle guitar plucking. Her beautiful harmonies with Lilly Lane. The bittersweet lyrics of a love lost.

There are just as many good places to listen to “Artemis” as well. Around a campfire? Yes. Pondering solemnly through a rainy window? Absolutely. At a hot summer pool party? Not the vibe.

So when “Artemis” was added to a Spotify playlist reportedly called “Summer Mix,” Paterson knew that something was afoot.

“It was at a little under 700 streams in one day, and then nothing after that,” she recalls. “That was suspicious to me, enough that I took a screenshot.”

Months later, that suspicion was justified. Paterson’s music distribution platform, CD Baby, sent her an email that Wake, the album featuring “Artemis,” had been flagged for AI streaming and was being removed from Spotify, without any opportunity for a rebuttal or dispute.
The assumption being that the playlist it was added to was part of a larger scheme for bots to stream the playlist on repeat, thus fraudulently boosting the songs’ streaming numbers.

It’s a difficult business quandary to navigate from both perspectives. To Spotify, these AI playlists absolutely exist, and once they’ve been made, the risk of operating from an “innocent until proven guilty” stance is that the entire platform would be filled with bot playlists in an instant. But to the artist, especially the independent local one, your hard work is at the risk of being immediately punished for something you didn’t do, but also something that you could never absolutely prove to Spotify that you didn’t do.

Rarely is there news that has no reference point from the past to look to, but this is a wholly July 2025 story. Neither artists nor streaming platforms have any precedent set for how to deal with this, so for now, the industry exists in an indefinite Wild West, where your songs could be removed at any moment, and nobody knows who’s doing it.

“I've only gone through SubmitHub,” Paterson says, referencing the platform that sends music to paid human playlist curators. “Unless someone did something that I didn't approve of in those transactions, this is something that happened wholly without my permission, and yet the artists are the ones whose music is getting taken down.”

As for Paterson, she’s planning a tour for September and has just begun re-releasing Wake on Spotify because of the incident, coinciding with a new vinyl pressing that’s available at her hometown McKinney record shop, Red Zeppelin.

“I’m sending people my electronic press kit, which has a link to my Spotify,” she says. “I’m talking about an album I released, and then the album’s not there, those numbers aren’t there. It’s one thing for the streaming income to not be there, but it’s another thing for me to look like I have less material out there. If people are using Spotify to gauge how many tickets an artist might sell, it’s snowballing into something that becomes a bigger problem.”

Paterson posted about the situation on social media and heard from fellow musician Rosy Lattanavong, who releases music as Rosy L, that the same situation happened with her song, “Paradise,” in late 2024. After the song had a sudden spike in streams, she received word from her distribution platform, DistroKid, that it was being removed.

“DistroKid made us take a quiz about what the difference is between a real playlist and a bot playlist,” she says. “It kind of felt humiliating, we know we did not put it in a bot playlist.”

It was a $10 fee to re-upload the song back onto Spotify using the same ISRC number, which stands for International Standard Recording Code. This means that the song could be added back onto the platform while retaining its original streaming numbers. Lattanavong went through the process to re-upload it and successfully got it back up, only to receive a second strike a week later.

DistroKid informed her that after a third strike, her entire discography would be at risk of being banned from Spotify completely.

“At this point, I’ll just cut my losses,” she says. “I removed ‘Paradise’ from Spotify completely.”

By coincidence, the song was featured on an international artists compilation, so it’s now back on Spotify, available to stream, but not under the original Rosy L release.
Days after we learned of Lattanavong’s story, another local band posted online about their song being taken down. The Deadly Beloved is a theatrical alt-rock band that lost “Don’t Runaway,” the penultimate song, to 2022’s Balloons For My Funeral album.

“It got like 1,000 streams in a day,” says lead singer Xavi Bernazard. “I thought it was weird. I reported it and didn’t think anything of it, then cut to last week, I get the email. No warning, and not only was the song removed, the entire album that the song was in was removed.”

Bernazard uses DistroKid as well, and their immediate solution was to look for a new distributor, although it might not make much difference.

“An artist doesn’t have any control about who puts what song in their playlist,” Bernazard says. “Didn’t ask for it and didn’t pay anything and then just having their music removed. I paid over $5K to make this album, a lot of money, a lot of a time for a literal creative baby. Taking it down for something I didn’t even do is really harsh.”
When they tried to contact Spotify about the issue, Bernazard was met, ironically, with automated customer service.

The band is still experiencing the issue, but there’s hope with Paterson’s story. After she resubmitted her songs for distribution again earlier this week, her album arrived back on Spotify on Thursday night with all the original streaming numbers, a process that can sometimes take up to two weeks.

The number of artists being hurt by this trend is growing, and the number that have already been hit in the small Dallas scene is a worrying sign that this could be far more widespread than listeners, artists or Spotify themselves realize.

“Clearly this is something that’s totally out of control,” Paterson says. “There’s no way to prove that the artist did or did not purchase it, so they just have to assume bad action on the part of the artist.”