The streaming giant’s latest reveal exposes a crisis the entire music industry can no longer ignore
The numbers are staggering — and they are only getting worse.
Deezer, the global music streaming platform, revealed on April 20 that it is now receiving nearly 75,000 fully AI-generated tracks every single day. That figure represents roughly 44% of all music uploaded to the platform daily, translating to more than two million AI-generated tracks per month. What began as a niche concern has quietly become one of the most urgent threats facing the music industry today.
And Deezer is the only streaming platform in the world actually talking about it openly.
Deezer’s Fight Against AI Flooding
The platform did not wait for the industry to catch up. Since launching its patent-pending AI music detection tool in January 2025, Deezer has been tracking the surge of synthetic content in real time — and the growth has been alarming. At the start of 2025, roughly 10,000 AI-generated tracks were being uploaded daily. In just over a year, that number has exploded to 75,000.
In June 2025, Deezer became the first — and still the only — streaming platform to explicitly tag AI-generated music for listeners. Over 13.4 million AI tracks were detected and tagged on the platform throughout 2025 alone. The company has since taken additional steps, including
- Removing AI-detected songs from all algorithmic recommendations
- Excluding AI tracks from editorial playlists
- Stopping the storage of high-resolution versions of AI-generated music
- Demonetizing fraudulent AI streams, which account for 85% of all AI-related plays
- Making its detection technology available for licensing to the broader music industry
Despite the flood of uploads, actual consumption of AI music on Deezer remains low — between 1% and 3% of total streams — a direct result of the platform’s proactive measures.
The Fraud Problem Hiding in Plain Sight
The sheer volume of AI uploads is not just a quality concern. It is a financial one. The overwhelming majority of AI-generated tracks being pushed onto streaming platforms are not being uploaded by artists experimenting with new tools. They are being uploaded to game the royalty system — flooding platforms with content designed to siphon payments away from human creators.
Deezer’s data makes this clear. Up to 85% of streams generated by fully AI-made tracks were flagged as fraudulent in 2025. When stream manipulation is detected, those plays are excluded from royalty calculations entirely. Without that safeguard, the damage to working musicians would be severe.
The broader financial threat is equally serious. A study conducted by CISAC and PMP Strategy found that nearly 25% of creators’ revenues could be at risk by 2028 — a figure that could reach as high as €4 billion. For an industry still recovering from the seismic shifts of the streaming era, that is not a distant warning. It is a countdown.
What Listeners Actually Think
In November 2025, Deezer commissioned the world’s first large-scale survey focused specifically on attitudes toward AI-generated music. The study, carried out by Ipsos across 9,000 people in eight countries, produced findings that should give every platform pause
- 97% of respondents could not tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and human-made music in a blind listening test
- 80% agreed that 100% AI-generated music should be clearly labeled for listeners
- 73% of streaming users said they want to know when a platform is recommending fully AI-generated content
- 52% felt that AI-generated songs should not appear alongside human-made music in mainstream charts
The message from listeners is consistent — transparency matters, and most people want to know what they are actually hearing.
The Industry Needs to Move
Deezer is not positioning itself as the only solution. The platform has made its AI detection technology available for licensing, giving other services the tools to join the fight. The detection system can identify AI-generated music from the most widely used generative models — including Suno and Udio — and is built to expand its capabilities as new tools emerge.
The call is clear. One platform cannot hold the line alone. As AI-generated content continues to grow at a pace the industry has never seen before, the window for meaningful collective action is getting smaller.
The music streaming world has a choice — get ahead of this, or get buried by it.
Source: Deezer Newsroom