Deezer Says More Than Half of Daily Music Uploads Are Now AI-Generated

Deezer says more than half the songs uploaded to its platform every day are now AI-generated. According to the streaming company's own tracking data, which it has published regularly since January 2025.

The numbers show a steady climb. In January 2025, AI-generated uploads sat around 10,000 tracks a day, about 10% of everything hitting the platform. By April 2025 that was 20,000 tracks, or 18%. September 2025: 30,000 tracks, 28%. November 2025: 50,000 tracks, 34%.

This year the pace didn't slow down. January 2026 brought 60,000 daily AI uploads, or 39% of the total. By April 2026, Deezer counted 75,000 tracks a day, 44% of uploads. Deezer says the number peaked in June 2026 at a monthly average of 90,000 AI-generated tracks per day, and the company now says AI music represents more than 50% of daily uploads.

That's a five-fold increase in raw volume in a year and a half, and a jump from one in ten uploads to more than one in two.

What Deezer Is Doing About It

Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier framed the response as a fraud and payment issue as much as a content issue. "Deezer has been at the frontline of fighting fraud and reducing payment dilution related to AI music for almost two years," Lanternier said in a statement. "Now that half of all daily uploads are AI-generated tracks, we are taking additional steps to safeguard the rights of artists and songwriters, while maintaining focus on music that fans actually love."

The company's latest move: pulling AI-generated tracks that haven't been streamed in six months, and pulling any tracks tied to fraudulent streaming activity meant to artificially inflate royalty payouts. Deezer has labeled AI-generated music on its platform since last year, and says its detection technology can identify output from Suno and Udio, the two AI-music startups currently fighting copyright lawsuits from major record labels.

Deezer also made that detection tool available to other platforms earlier this year, though it's not clear any major competitor has actually adopted it. Last month the company released a separate tool that scans Apple Music and Spotify playlists for AI-generated tracks.

No Industry Consensus

The streaming industry doesn't have a shared playbook here, and Deezer's numbers make clear why that's a problem. Bandcamp has taken the hardest line, banning AI-generated tracks outright. Tidal cut off monetization for them. Apple Music went the softer route with a voluntary AI-tagging system that relies on artists and labels to self-report. Spotify built its own internal policy governing how much AI involvement is allowed in a track before it gets flagged.

Four different platforms, four different rulebooks. None of them agree on the basic question of whether AI music should exist on a commercial streaming service, let alone how to label it or pay for it.

The fraud angle is where this stops being an artistic debate and becomes a financial one. Streaming royalties get paid out of a shared pool based on relative play counts. When someone floods a platform with thousands of AI-generated tracks and uses bots or fake accounts to stream them, that person siphons real money away from actual working musicians. Deezer calls this "payment dilution," and it's the same math problem that made streaming payouts to indie artists notoriously thin to begin with. More fake tracks competing for the same royalty pool means less money for everyone who didn't cheat.

There's a reasonable counterargument here too. Not everyone using AI music tools is running a fraud operation. Independent musicians use AI for demos, backing tracks, and experimentation, and plenty of legitimate hobbyists upload AI-assisted work with no intent to game the system. Deezer's crackdown targets zero-stream tracks and confirmed fraud, not AI music generally, which is a narrower and more defensible line than an outright ban.

Suno and Udio, the two companies most often named in this fight, are both currently defending copyright lawsuits brought by major record labels including Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Warner Music Group, though neither company has been found liable for infringement in those cases as of now. Deezer's ability to detect their output specifically suggests the platform has built detection models trained against those two services in particular, not a generalized AI-detection system.

What happens next depends on whether Spotify, Apple Music, or Amazon Music adopt Deezer's detection tool or build their own. None have announced plans to do so. Until they do, the same AI-generated flood Deezer is now cutting off could simply move to whichever platform polices it least.