The last thing Australian singer-songwriter Mezz Coleman expected to hear was that Spotify had removed her debut album from its streaming platform.

After all, her two-year-old body of work had already reached tens of thousands of listeners on the platform.

Yet an email from distributor DistroKid on July 3, 2025, said that the entire album had been removed because listens on a single song were "artificial".

Her experience, shared by other Australian artists, raises the question: how far should a mega-corporation go to protect itself from artificial intelligence (AI)?

Spotify, by far the largest international music streaming service with 700 million monthly listeners, provided $US10 billion ($A15.4 billion) in music payouts over the course of 2024.

The company says that those payouts "

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