The tide has crossed the halfway mark. Deezer said this week that AI songs made up more than 50% of its June uploads. It is a first for the French streamer.
From a trickle to a flood #
The climb has been steep. Deezer started counting in January 2025, when AI made up roughly 10% of daily uploads. It hit 18% by that April, then 34% by November and 44% in April 2026. Now it is above half, at about 90,000 tracks a day.
Deezer can measure this because it built detection tools for machine-made music. They flag tracks from AI generators like Suno and Udio. It tags the songs and keeps them out of recommendations and playlists.
The point is fraud #
The volume is not really about listeners. Fully AI tracks make up just 1% to 3% of actual streams, Deezer says. But 85% of those streams were fraudulent last year.
The scheme is simple. Someone generates thousands of slop songs, bulk-uploads them, then buys bots and streaming farms to rack up fake plays. Streamers split royalties as a share of one pot. So even a sliver of a listen, spread across a mountain of tracks, siphons money from real artists. One US man pleaded guilty to an $8m version of it.
Deezer draws a line #
So Deezer is deleting. It will now remove AI tracks tied to fraudulent streams, and any track unplayed for six months. It pays no royalties on streams it judges fake.
“We are taking additional steps to safeguard the rights of artists and songwriters,” chief executive Alexis Lanternier said. He called on rivals to agree shared standards. Even Mick Jagger has said AI is fine, as long as the music is genuinely original.
One platform against a glacier #
Deezer is out ahead, and mostly alone. Bandcamp has banned AI music, and Tidal has cut its royalties. Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon have gone lighter, with labels and badges. Apple Music’s own executives say more than a third of its uploads are now fully AI.
The stakes are real. One study projects creators could lose up to $4 billion a year to AI-music fraud by 2028. The generators behind the flood are already in court. Sony is still suing Udio. And Suno, which trained partly on Deezer’s own catalogue, faces claims from the labels. Whether one streamer’s cull is a dam or a chip off a glacier is the open question.
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