Well, about that... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koan_(program)

Honestly anything from before and including 2024 is probably safe. Everything took off (including the mass uploading to platforms) in late 2024.

Artists appearing in 2025+ are, unfortunately, going to be mostly AI content farms. Real humans will be the exception and we'll somehow have to tell them apart using side channels like live performances.

This is a valid approach, and one i use as well. My wife likes flute/meditation music to help her sleep sometimes. Spotify is full AI generated covers in that genre, always at the top of the search results somehow, maybe because it is new?

Anyway, i spend an extra 15 mins digging through for older albums, of which there are some good ones from the 2000s and 2010s.

A good filter on human slop -- in genres where that can be a problem, like children's songs -- is to look for releases before it became popular to self publish on Spotify itself. Sometime around 2015 maybe?

There are definitely exceptions to that rule though (in both directions!), so i don't discount everything released more recently out of hand.

same and artists i already know