Deezer says 44% of new music uploads are AI-generated, most streams are fraudulent

AI tracks account for a small fraction of Deezer streams, and most are demonetized for fraud.

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[oluseyi]

I'm confused, why would DJs want to put themselves out of business by making it easier for AI to mimic them?

I don’t think it’s necessarily the DJs pushing for the structure, but other interested parties. Fund a few critics, pay a few DJs and suddenly you’ve astroturfed a “grassroots movement for structured electrodance.”

 

[oluseyi]

I agree. That said, both jazz and oldstyle funk seems to be less AI infested than many genres. Perhaps syncopation is still a few years away from being easily reproduced by machines clinging hard to pattern recognition?

No, they just don’t have as many contemporary listeners so they’re not as appealing of targets.

 

[SplatMan_DK]

Recently i found a lot of remixes of some music i like. Oh hey neat.
The downside? They ended up being AI-generated.
Which is a shame because it takes a lot of musical skill and understanding to take a particular song and remake it in the style of another artist.
The most poignant example for me was youtuber Geoffplaysguitar taking music and remixing it in the style of Mick Gordon's Doom soundtrack. Each video he does a breakdown of how he comes up with his remixed version. Super fascinating. And i know he's not the only person that does this.

It's this guy. And he's pretty cool.

https://www.geoffreydaymusic.com/

"Geoffplaysguitar" is just his online persona.

 

[TekaroBB]

I agree. That said, both jazz and oldstyle funk seems to be less AI infested than many genres. Perhaps syncopation is still a few years away from being easily reproduced by machines clinging hard to pattern recognition?

If I had to guess it's less that AI is bad at mimicking it and more that those are just less popular genres to bother pointing the slop engine at. If you are mass producing garbage you may as well target the largest and least discerning crowds.

 

[Amarillo3]

Yes, the era of paying another premium for music produced from 100% organically farmed humans is here, but no one will stock it on a shelf.

Authenthic human experiences will be the luxury item of the future.

 

[KrookedRooster]

I remember when the worst thing was when someone would upload to Napster or Limewire or Kazaa a "NEW WEIRD AL PARODY!!!!1!!" because everyone was thirsting for something new and fun. We were all taken for a ride but at least that had a human make it.

I am not an expert on Music Law but I'm pretty sure Weird-Al had to have his people talk to other people to get the rights to do parodies or sound-alikes?

And if John Fogerty can get sued for sounding too much like John Fogerty...


Is this another "Safe Harbor" thing where nobody can litigate against Spotify because they are just the go-between but nobody is going to figure out who is the initial uploader to go after them for dollars?

And the only reason Spotify is stopping this probably isn't legal ramification but that it doesn't want to pay out copious amounts of money to non-artists who are gaming the system.

It doesn't even want to pay the money to real artists but that is another whole thing.

 

[42Kodiak42]

A friend turned me on to a band called Elements of Dysfunction. They seemed like a crunky new blues band and we were both enjoying them. But I've been unable to find anything about them online, and I have noticed that a lot of their songs share an alarming number of similarities. I fear they might be an AI band.

I don't know the tells of AI music well enough to judge on those grounds. But most musicians at least write down something about who they are somewhere, something that links their online presence to who they are. It's a huge red flag nowadays.

 

[WaveMotionGum]

Music is in this weird place where its cultural value from decades past is still with us but its literal value based on scarcity has never been lower. AI has made this worse but it was already an absolute flood.

 

[TekaroBB]

I don't know the tells of AI music well enough to judge on those grounds. But most musicians at least write down something about who they are somewhere, something that links their online presence to who they are. It's a huge red flag nowadays.

Used to be every time I found a new Metal band I liked I'd give them a quick google to be sure they aren't Neo Nazis or whatever. Now I've also got to check to be sure they are real humans.

 

[DCStone]

I would be amazed and pleased if AI could make something that sounds passably like Beethoven, Bach or Chopin. Or even Rachmaninoff! But I truly doubt I will ever live to see or hear that.

The problem with AI is that it can't make the really good stuff.

The problem with people is that they can't tell the really good stuff from mediocre fodder that AI is capable of mimicking.

Computer-generated music in the style of various composers has been around a lot longer than the current AI craze. And some of it is quite sophisticated. This covers some of the more recent stuff:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/inno...eethovens-unfinished-10th-symphony-180978753/

I'm heard of other works in the style of major classical composers, although search is getting pretty useless for finding anything older than 6 months these days. But it's there.

Suno is something else entirely though, and it's not good. If you want a deep dive on it, this lengthy video is a good place to start:


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8dcFhF0Dlk

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

You know, maybe generative AI was a mistake.

 

[DrewW]

Honestly all pop music with a reliance on Autotune has sounded AI-generated to me since long before AI had the ability to compose music.

This is the T-Pain paradox. T-Pain is a great singer, really. But T-Pain autotuned himself to bits when creating his music.

Is it AI? Is it artistic intent? I don’t know. Does it sound better on a CD blaring out of a Pontiac Firebird with an irrational level of bass? Yes.

 

[josh1984]

Bardcore music on YouTube is fire, and I'm not ashamed. SkyBrows rocks too.

 

[nononsense]

Authenthic human experiences will be the luxury item of the future.

Just like real snakes.

 

[TekaroBB]

This is the T-Pain paradox. T-Pain is a great singer, really. But T-Pain autotuned himself to bits when creating his music.

Is it AI? Is it artistic intent? I don’t know. Does it sound better on a CD blaring out of a Pontiac Firebird with an irrational level of bass? Yes.

I feel the same way with Believe by Cher. The woman can sign but I never liked the autotune effect on that song.

 

[Great_Scott]

To all the people who have said they don't care because certainly AI won't come for classical music --- with the entire spectrum of the creative process that AI has stolen from and repurposed, how is it possible that you think that will be the line in the sand?

Because the market is too small to bother with, alongside the fact that for enthusiasts the artists and works are a small pool that is well-known.

 

[murty]

The YouTube channel, Digging The Greats (good channel, FYI), put up an excellent piece the other day about “AI” use in music, and not just about the most popularly discussed kind (generative LLM created music), but all the gradients currently being used on the production side.


View: https://youtu.be/CVXewkmZ3hc?si=yDlpxCt07juEiR6L


Whole thing is a good watch, I’d definitely recommend it. Delves into some areas and concepts related to this that I hadn’t considered.

Of particular note, he talks about how a lot of folks are using generative tools for early composition (such as creating a drum line, or choral backup vocals), then hiring musicians to record it for the final production.

A seemingly more innocuous use at a glance, but when you consider that music made without it involves working with other musicians and collaborating on compositions, a lot of the creative process is lost when you’re no longer allowing the experts of their respective instruments/voices to be directly involved. There is no opportunity for them to say ‘what if I played my part this way instead?’, and then trying that out to see how it sounds.

As a good example, he mentions how he knows many studio drummers these days that are being sent generative drum lines and then asked to record their part remotely, exactly as presented. They are told not to add any fills, flourishes, or other tweaks, just play it 1:1 from what Suno (or whatever) spits out. Not only are you hampering the opportunity for something better, you’re actively releasing music that is more rote and conformed to previous compositions than something more unique and creative.

Also, if you care about labor issues regarding “AI”, that is actively robbing musicians from pay they would normally get for studio time composing and practicing. Similarly, if you care about copytheft issues regarding what Suno and similar tools trained on, you’re actively contributing to that too.

Recently i found a lot of remixes of some music i like. Oh hey neat.
The downside? They ended up being AI-generated.
Which is a shame because it takes a lot of musical skill and understanding to take a particular song and remake it in the style of another artist.
The most poignant example for me was youtuber Geoffplaysguitar taking music and remixing it in the style of Mick Gordon's Doom soundtrack. Each video he does a breakdown of how he comes up with his remixed version. Super fascinating. And i know he's not the only person that does this.

The amount of gen”AI” video game music on YouTube these days is overwhelming. It’s rather disappointing.

There’s so many talented musicians that have been doing various arrangements and remixes of video game music over the years, but lately they’re getting buried behind a flood of (often not identified as) gen”AI” slop.

There’s a pretty good chance these days that if you see any “X video game sound track played in Y genre” posted on YT in the last year or two, that it’s fake BS. These fucks often don’t even credit original composers of the soundtracks, let alone identify that they generated it from a slop machine. I block those channels when I find them, but it’s a game of whack-a-mole, because two more heads of the hydra pop up for every one you chop off.

 

[taliska]

W

This is the T-Pain paradox. T-Pain is a great singer, really. But T-Pain autotuned himself to bits when creating his music.

Is it AI? Is it artistic intent? I don’t know. Does it sound better on a CD blaring out of a Pontiac Firebird with an irrational level of bass? Yes.

Well I just learned something new...amazing voice...

Here's my favourite T-Pain related thing in return:


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avaSdC0QOUM&list=RDavaSdC0QOUM&start_radio=1

 

[puppies]

Deezer says it has developed technology to detect AI uploads, and it’s one of the few streamers to explicitly label such content

So I use Deezer, but I'm curious specifically which services are comparatively better or worse at rooting out slop. Would be good consumer advice.

 

[MST2.021K]

Used to be every time I found a new Metal band I liked I'd give them a quick google to be sure they aren't Neo Nazis or whatever. Now I've also got to check to be sure they are real humans.

Time to listen to the new hit by Silicon Supremacy.

 

[AdeptFelix]

There’s a pretty good chance these days that if you see any “X video game sound track played in Y genre” posted on YT in the last year or two, that it’s fake BS. These fucks often don’t even credit original composers of the soundtracks, let alone identify that they generated it from a slop machine. I block those channels when I find them, but it’s a game of whack-a-mole, because two more heads of the hydra pop up for every one you chop off.

I'm kinda sad that this reminds me of when Bury the Light by Casey Edwards for DMC5 somehow got replaced on Spotify by a crap AI "cover" for months. Like somehow full on replaced the original.

 

[informationsuperhighway]

I uploade 5000 AI generated songs and earning 700 a month. Gonna increase it to 500,000 songs to increase my earnings. Gonna sell a course on how to earn a living publishing a "how to live from AI music royalties" for 99.95 USD. Time is limited before the price jumps to 300 dollars.

 

[Fred Duck]

Are you listening to actual recordings of Beethoven from the 1800's or are you listening to later recordings where the symphony was looking at the sheet music?

Ah, sorry if this comment is slightly off-topic but I never considered that before. How did symphonies perform in the 1800s if they didn't have sheet music? (That was a little before my time.)

 

[Aurich]

The YouTube channel, Digging The Greats (good channel, FYI), put up an excellent piece the other day about “AI” use in music, and not just about the most popularly discussed kind (generative LLM created music), but all the gradients currently being used on the production side.

Oh I have that on my watch list, big fan of his channel. I highly recommend his content. I think a lot of Ars readers would appreciate his second most recent video:


View: https://youtu.be/NR1Lf-CQyfw

 

[Granadico]

The amount of gen”AI” video game music on YouTube these days is overwhelming. It’s rather disappointing.

There’s so many talented musicians that have been doing various arrangements and remixes of video game music over the years, but lately they’re getting buried behind a flood of (often not identified as) gen”AI” slop.

There’s a pretty good chance these days that if you see any “X video game sound track played in Y genre” posted on YT in the last year or two, that it’s fake BS. These fucks often don’t even credit original composers of the soundtracks, let alone identify that they generated it from a slop machine. I block those channels when I find them, but it’s a game of whack-a-mole, because two more heads of the hydra pop up for every one you chop off.

Gotta shout out to 8 Bit Big Band, they've been doing it for years, play live on the recordings, and I've seen their show live. I don't expect musicians to be their own videographers and editing experts but at this point just showing yourself playing is just the easiest way to know it's not AI.

The past year I've fallen in love with "X album with Y system sound font", that's pretty easy to use AI for so it's hard to filter it out sadly. It's depressing to be skeptical over everything nowadays.

 

[nononsense]

I feel the same way with Believe by Cher. The woman can sign but I never liked the autotune effect on that song.

The autotune on that song was used as an effect, much like a compressor or a chorus or reverb. There were parts of that song that were using the autotune and parts that were not and part of the drama of the song is the switching back and forth between the two sounds. It wasn’t a crutch, it was a very purposeful audio effect.

I approve of using autotune as an effect, it’s just not acceptable when it’s used to cover a singer’s insufficiencies. And it’s fine to dislike the effect in the song if that’s your personal preference but it’s just another effect and certainly has nothing to do with AI.

 

[GenocideOwl]

rate of AI uploads to Deezer has reached a staggering 44 percent—that’s 75,000 new AI tracks on Deezer every single day

I am always blown away by the insane amount of content some of these platforms have to manage. Averaging over 150,000 uploads a day is so crazy to think about. If a song averages at least four minutes, that would take over an entire year to listen to all of it straight. Who is making all of this music day after day? And that is Deezer, who at least in a couple lists I found puts them outside the top 10 in subscriber count. Imagine how much more Spotify gets today(couldn't seem to find a recent trustworthy source to compare).


Also I find it so fascinating seeing Deezer rep's talk about fighting back against AI uploads and botted view counts. It feels like others are not even trying to fight against that stuff, which is weird as those people are essentially scamming the platforms out of money.

I watched somebody do a deep dive into Five Minute Craft's channel and their owners. If you didn't know, TheSoul Group is a Russian-backed media conglomerate that posts all over Youtube, Instagram, and TikTok. By most counts, if you combine all the Soul Group YT channels under one umbrella, they become the largest YT channel in terms of subs and view counts. In this deep dive he showed very compelling evidence that these channels are HEAVILY botted. What they do is when a new video is put out(which happens multiple times a day across different channels and platforms) there is a flurry of artificial views and comments.

The comments are especially obvious as they don't even pretend to make it realistic. They setup a scraper to watch their channel for new uploads and showed that new videos will get hundreds of comments literally within seconds of a video going live. All with similar non-descript comments("so funny!", "Great idea!") and overuse of emojis for some reason.

I guess my point was that I find it so interesting that Deezer openly talks about how botted views are a big problem for them that they are fighting against. But YouTube's biggest content creation channel network appears to be heavily, and blatantly, botting all their videos and Google at minimum is looking the other way, at worst is actively fostering this type of behavior. Meta and whoever the fuck owns US TikTok now are guilty of the same thing.

The extra irony is that the type of content they put out is literally mostly fake slop. 5-minute crafts type videos were social media slop before the AI slop was even coined as a term. Why does the likes of Google even want that type of content on their network at all?

 

[nononsense]

Ah, sorry if this comment is slightly off-topic but I never considered that before. How did symphonies perform in the 1800s if they didn't have sheet music? (That was a little before my time.)

The printing press was invented in the 15th century. The invention of the printing press predates what we now consider Classical music by a few centuries,.

 

[kmmatney]

How do people even come across AI music? I listen to many hours of Apple music a day (work at home) and only presented with music from real artists. I have my own extensive library, but usually listen to playlists generated by Apple - I'm sure the playlists are generated by AI, but its always real artists for the music. Do these other music services want to give AI slop so they don't have to pay royalties?

 

[etothepii]

This has become a real headache for me with YouTube Music. Autoplay will readily play AI creators, and doesn't offer a good way to check that they are AI. Additionally, due to the interface, even if an uploader discloses that they use AI on their channel info, that information isn't easily surfaced in the YouTube music app.

So I've had to adopt a strategy of "ok, I don't think I've heard this artist before, do they have a lot of really recent releases, all within the last year? What does their cover art look like?"

Even when you find out an artist is AI, there's not always a good way to prevent them from creeping into your playlists. YouTube music, as far as I can tell, doesn't off anything like a block function. You can thumbs down tracks, but that's not guaranteed to block someone.

 

[nononsense]

Gotta shout out to 8 Bit Big Band, they've been doing it for years, play live on the recordings, and I've seen their show live. I don't expect musicians to be their own videographers and editing experts but at this point just showing yourself playing is just the easiest way to know it's not AI.

The past year I've fallen in love with "X album with Y system sound font", that's pretty easy to use AI for so it's hard to filter it out sadly. It's depressing to be skeptical over everything nowadays.

I’m an amateur musician and I used to write songs and send them to friends but now I wouldn’t even think about sending a song without a video showing me playing the keyboard. This change was necessitated by my brief experiment with AI music generation. The one I was using let you play something on the piano and upload that track and then upload lyrics and the AI would finish it for you.

It was scary. So fuck that. I’ve learned to make music videos.

edit to add: If anyone has not heard the 8 Bit Big Band’s arrangement from the ending of Portal, ‘Still Alive’, you should immediately go to YouTube and give it a listen. It’s fantastic. Not going to link it here because that is one of my pet peeves.

 

[FSTargetDrone]

Thank god I've reached the point of my life where I mostly listen to the music from my youth.

I kid, I kid. All this AI generated content - I refuse to call it art - is overwhelming human-created works and it's depressing. I hate it. I don't respect people that use it. At a certain point, any meaningful creativity is outsourced away from the human, and that's no longer art. It's slop.

As far as I'm concerned, "art" requires consciousness. An elephant slathering paint on a canvas with a brush in its trunk is more "art" than any artificially-generated imagery or sound spit out by any computer.

If people somehow enjoy looking at or listening to something produced by a machine, whatever. I just want it all labelled as "AI."

 

[Kenjitsuka]

we have shown that it’s possible to reduce AI-related fraud and payment dilution in streaming to a minimum

Source: Trust us, bro!

 

[Dachannien]

Keep that in mind in each of your hobbies as influencers keep popping up to start preaching the "right way to do something" when no one cared for years as long as the final product was good.

Nobody's going to watch a video where someone's take-home is "I'm not going to show you how I do X, because there's no right answer and you should just do X however you want as long as the results are fun and interesting." They will watch a how-to video that promises the secret sauce to making X objectively good so that the viewer is empowered to Get Rich Quick by pursuing X.

It seems like a stretch to me to blame that on influencers being on the take from purveyors of AI slop. The appetite is for making it big in whatever without either being innately good at it or without putting in the time and effort to get good at it. This content feeds that appetite, driven by The Algorithm simply wanting to maximize ad views.

 

[Pat_Murph]

AI-generated classical music has been a thing for a while now, line was crossed years ago.

I dunno where people are getting this idea that their special genre is slop-free, I promise you it's not.

As with anything else in 2026 you just need to be a discerning consumer.

Some classical music listeners are so arrogant and insee it reflected in this way of thinking.

They think that their music is special and nothing tjat came after rivals in it's complexity and skill. They are delusional and ign4oant.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Gonna point this out:

This is the reason why in the DJ space online there is a huge push for everyone to start conforming to rules about phrasing, key changes, and [insert word]-play.

The more regimented you make the music, the easier is for someone to write a LLM that can follow these "industry-standard" rules to put out slop.

Keep that in mind in each of your hobbies as influencers keep popping up to start preaching the "right way to do something" when no one cared for years as long as the final product was good.

I'm seeing a LOT of this in amateur "writing critics" these days, treating tvtropes and the "hero's journey" as PREscriptive rather than DEscriptive. They're rating stories based on a score count, cinema sins style, and trying to punch through that and point out that stories aren't inherently bad for "breaking" these supposed rules... well it's frustrating. When I pointed out that these weren't hard and fast rules and that stuff like "cinema sins" was probably a massive mistake, someone who completely missed the point I was trying to get at responded "oh so the masses shouldn't have these vitally important tools?!". Like, no, they're not even tools. They're at best observations.

I'm sure it won't be long until we get influencers straight up TELLING people to "obey the tropes" and that stories can objectively be rated on a cinema sins scale.

 

[TD912]

I've been listening to some J-pop in the car on Apple Music, letting it play similar songs by creating a station from one song. A song started playing that was kinda catchy but sounded "off", with overly clean vocals and felt oddly modern western-sounding.

Pressed a button on CarPlay to switch to Music app, and the track was "City Pop Night" by artist "Japanese City Pop" which was a dead AI giveaway. Uploaded in 2025 with a bunch of other "albums".

Somebody was probably trying to make a quick buck by generating some vaguely city pop-ish tracks with 80's vibes and Japanese vocals but didn't get it quite right which threw me off. Maybe the models were mainly trained on more modern western music or was mashing different genres together and landed on some weird hybrid of the two, or the western "artist" just generated whatever sounded good to their ears, I have no idea.

It makes sense as 80's city pop has been getting a decent following outside of Asia lately, so slop makers are probably trying to target the genre by flooding streaming services with it.

 

[Fatesrider]

Sure.



Calling all non-classical music slop? Don't be an ass.


I don't want to listen to AI music, I want to reward human creativity. But I also don't want that to require my tastes to become frozen in time, a slave to nostalgia. I want to hear new works and new styles.

For now, yes, you probably do. And it's possible you'll keep that perspective.

For most, however, there will come a time when it no longer speaks to them. It's speaking to a younger generation, and ignoring all the others on purpose. Each generation has its own voice, and most of that voice is expressed through their music.

That's happened time and again every generation going back as far as recorded history extends. Each creates its own identity and tends to stick to it. Collectively, this is how humans are.

Individuals may find different paths - it takes all kinds, after all. But for the most part, people who hear music will want the composer to have been flesh and blood who speaks to them and their reality, and not something created by algorithms and stolen IP.

 

[Fred Duck]

The printing press was invented in the 15th century. The invention of the printing press predates what we now consider Classical music by a few centuries,.

That's true but the comment suggests that musicians in Beethoven's day didn't use the technology. I mean, I certainly don't have a printing press! double checks

So are you suggesting the poster was delirious or perhaps that the joke was technically incorrect, the worst kind of incorrect?

 

[Camberwick]

I was intrigued to hear that AI tools like Wondera.ai could compose convincing classical music, so I set it the task of some Schubert. What came back was classic Schlager! Two bars in and I could almost see the lederhosen-clad gentlemen on an alp, swinging keytars. Still some way to go...