Lorde Calls Out Spotify Over AI Song Summaries
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- Lorde posted on Instagram Stories sharing a screenshot of Spotify's beta "About the Song" feature, writing: "Hey Spotify, I'm gonna go out on a limb [and] say we don't want this."
- The AI-generated summary for Lorde's "Current Affairs" misattributed a performance from her Ultrasound World Tour—describing her stripping to underwear while a dancer poured water on her stomach—to the wrong song, according to Lorde
- Lorde argued the feature "reduces a song to an AI generated meaning right at the source" and "limits free interpretation," calling on Spotify to at minimum allow artists to opt out
- Spotify launched the "About the Song" feature in beta earlier this year, pulling context from third-party web sources such as themusic.com.au
- Spotify removed the inaccurate text from Lorde's song and told Pitchfork: "It's still in beta... when something's off, we move fast to fix it, like we did here. Getting it right matters to us."
Why it matters: Lorde's complaint surfaces a concrete product gap: Spotify's beta AI tool synthesizes third-party web content into song summaries with no artist opt-out and no obvious pre-publication review. For the millions of musicians on the platform, that means creative intent and biographical context can be flattened—or, as here, plainly misattributed—by an automated feature the artist cannot control.
