Half the New Songs on Deezer Are Now Made by AI. As Many as 85% of Their Plays Were Fake.

In June, something happened on the music streaming service Deezer that had never happened before. More than half of all the new music uploaded to the platform each day was fully generated by AI — roughly 90,000 tracks a day, according to the company.

Here is the strange part. Almost nobody is listening. AI-generated tracks account for only 1 to 3 percent of streams on Deezer. And of the plays those tracks did get in 2025, Deezer says up to 85 percent were fraudulent — bots streaming machine-made songs to farm royalty payments.

So the music industry now has a supply problem that looks nothing like a demand problem. Songs are being produced faster than any human audience could hear them, and a large share of the “listeners” are software too. On October 1, a group of Chicago musicians stood in the rain and asked real listeners to do the one thing a bot never will: stop pressing play.

From 10,000 a day to 90,000 in eighteen months

Deezer is the only major service that publishes how much AI music it receives, because it built its own detection tool and switched it on in January 2025. The numbers it has released since then trace a steep curve:

Deezer is not an outlier. In August, Apple Music executive Oliver Schusser said that more than a third of the music submitted to Apple Music every month is “100% AI” — while listening to it sits below 0.5 percent. Two services, the same shape: a flood going in, a trickle coming out.

The platforms pick labels, not bans

None of the big services is banning AI music. All three are now moving to label it — and to quietly keep it out of what they recommend.

• Deezer tags fully AI-generated tracks for listeners as of June 2026, the first platform to do so, and removes them from algorithmic and editorial recommendations.
• Spotify announced on August 11 that AI-generated artists must carry an “AI Persona” badge on their profiles, in search and on playlist tracks. Starting in mid-September, their music is excluded from personalized recommendations by default — you only get it if you follow the artist. Spotify can apply the badge itself to profiles it suspects are AI.
• Apple Music told industry partners on August 20 that a visible “Made With AI” label is coming “later this year” for songs, artwork and videos. It relies on labels and distributors disclosing AI use, not on detection.

That last difference is bigger than it looks. Deezer runs its own detector. Apple, for now, is trusting uploaders to admit it — the same uploaders, in some cases, who are flooding the system.

And listeners have said fairly clearly what they want. In a survey Deezer commissioned in November 2025, 97 percent of respondents could not tell AI music from human-made music, 80 percent supported clear labeling, and 52 percent did not want AI tracks in the main charts.

“This is fake music, and this is real music”

On October 1, about 20 Chicago musicians stood outside the Chicago Federal Center in the rain, chanting “Pause AI!” Their black T-shirts read “Human Music Only. Press Pause on AI.” They asked for legal protection against AI copies of their work and a clear line between AI-made music and theirs.

Their ask of the public is concrete: skip Spotify and Apple Music on October 26 and 27. Spotify has drawn most of the anger in Chicago for a year, mostly over pay. The AI flood sharpens that complaint — the musicians are competing for the same royalty pool with tens of thousands of machine-made tracks a day, many of them propped up by fake plays.

Twenty people in the rain will not dent Spotify’s numbers. But the timing lands in the middle of the labeling rollouts, and the platforms’ own data backs the musicians’ central point: the AI music is being made in bulk, real people are mostly not choosing it, and a lot of the attention it does get is not human at all.