From mid-September, Spotify will brand non-existent musicians with an “AI Persona” badge to save listeners from getting attached to a bundle of code. The target is fully synthetic personas, fictional AI characters presented as artists, with no real person behind them. A listener has to actively follow or save an AI Persona’s music before it appears in their personalised experience. Spotify is making a choice to prioritise human-fronted acts in the default discovery stream and treat AI personas as an opt-in niche. AI music is acceptable as content, but AI “artists” are not being treated as peers to human creators when it comes to the platform’s most valuable resource: its recommendation engine.