King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, photo by Maclay Heriot

In July, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard announced that they would no longer host their music on Spotify. Following a precedent set by early critics Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu, and since adopted by Massive Attack, Sylvan Esso, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Cindy Lee, Hotline TNT, Skee Mask, John Mailander and more, the shape-shifting Australian psych ensemble attributed the move to an objection to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s investment in AI-powered military software. In their absence, an AI impersonator gained traction on the streamer.

Earlier in December, an artist profile named King Lizard Wizard arrived on Spotify with a slew of crude imitations made with generative AI. Titles, lyrics and often structures and melodies of slop songs like “Nuclear Fusion,” “Gamma Knife,” and “Sense” were taken directly from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s discography, and the profile raked in more than 35 thousand listeners over weeks until Spotify noticed King Gizzard fans’ complaints on Reddit. Before the tracks were pulled, the artless rip-off of “Rattlesnake” appeared in some listeners’ Spotify Release Radar playlists.

King Gizzard frontman Stu Mackenzie said he’s “trying to see the irony in this situation” in a statement, but underscored: “Seriously wtf – we are truly doomed.”

“Spotify strictly prohibits any form of artist impersonation,” a representative for the streamer said in a statement to the Guardian. “The content in question was removed for violating our platform policies, and no royalties were paid out for any streams generated.”

In a September press conference, Spotify announced that its new position on AI music would encourage artistic use by cracking down on “slop.” A revised impersonation policy would build on prior efforts to prevent “content mismatch” by implementing a new system that targets exploitative voice clones. A spam filter, also arriving over the coming months, is intended to curb the deluge of “mass uploads, duplicates, SEO hacks, artificially short track abuse, and other forms of slop [that] have become easier to exploit as AI tools make it simpler for anyone to generate large volumes of music.” The effectiveness of these changes remains to be seen.

As Spotify dropped its annual Wrapped retrospective of user listening data last week, the streaming platform faced another surge of criticism. Amid an exodus of individual users in response to Ek’s venture capital firm Prima Materia and its investment in Helsing, a defense technology company specializing in AI-enhanced weapons and surveillance systems, grassroots organizations Indivisible Project, Working Families and 50501 Movement launched the Spotify Unwrapped campaign. The new initiative from the organizers of the No Kings protests highlights Spotify’s connections to military technology, its ICE recruitment ads, and its promotion of AI-generated music.

While Spotify claims to have removed 75 million spammy tracks in the last 12 months, the platform’s continued issues with AI content should be read alongside its controversial Perfect Fit Content initiative, through which the company infamously commissioned ghost artists to populate its curated passive listening playlists while retaining a greater share of royalties.

“Can we put pressure on these Dr. Evil tech bros to do better?,” King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard wrote to announce their exit from Spotify. “Join us on another platform.” The band’s full catalog is currently set to “name your price” on Bandcamp.