Deezer is drowning in AI music. The streaming service revealed that 44% of all new tracks uploaded to its platform, roughly 75,000 songs per day, are now AI-generated. That's over two million AI tracks monthly. The growth has been relentless: 10,000 daily AI uploads in January 2025, 30,000 by September, 50,000 in November, 60,000 in January 2026, and now 75,000. CEO Alexis Lanternier said in a press release that the company hopes "the whole music ecosystem will join us in taking action to help safeguard artists' rights and promote transparency for fans."
Most of this content is spam. Deezer reports that 85% of AI-generated streams are flagged as fraudulent and demonetized. This is revenue farming, plain and simple. Bad actors flood platforms with generated tracks and use bots or hijacked accounts to siphon streaming payouts. When accounts get caught and shut down, new ones pop up within hours. SubmitHub, which sees 20% of submitted songs flagged as AI-generated, reports that roughly 25% of people submitting AI music actively try to hide it, some using scripts to "clean" audio and bypass detection.
Deezer has responded aggressively. It tags AI tracks and excludes them from algorithmic recommendations and editorial playlists. It will stop storing hi-res versions of AI content. In 2025 alone, the platform tagged more than 13.4 million AI tracks. But the broader ecosystem has a conflict problem. Platforms like Spotify and Apple Music outsource content policing to distributors, the same companies that profit from upload volume. Many distributors charge per track or take revenue shares, incentivizing quantity over quality. The upshot is that AI farms can "launder" content into legitimate catalogs before anyone catches it, highlighting issues with artist identity verification.
The music itself is convincing. A Deezer survey found that 97% of listeners couldn't tell AI tracks from human-made ones, while 80% want clear labeling. Last week, an AI-generated song topped iTunes charts in five countries. The fraud works, and until the economics change, neither will the people profiting from it.