AI-generated music is no longer a fringe concern for streaming platforms. According to TechCrunch, Deezer has confirmed that AI tracks now make up more than 50% of all music uploaded to its platform daily, with June 2026 marking a peak of 90,000 AI-generated tracks per day.
That number is hard to ignore. Back in January 2025, AI tracks accounted for around 10,000 uploads per day, or about 10% of daily uploads. In just 18 months, that figure has grown ninefold. This is not a slow creep. It is a flood, and it is putting real pressure on streaming services to decide what kind of platform they want to be.
Deezer has been tracking this data since last year, and the trend is consistent. Here is how the numbers have grown over time:
- January 2025: ~10,000 tracks/day (10% of uploads)
- April 2025: ~20,000 tracks/day (18%)
- September 2025: ~30,000 tracks/day (28%)
- November 2025: ~50,000 tracks/day (34%)
- January 2026: ~60,000 tracks/day (39%)
- April 2026: ~75,000 tracks/day (44%)
- June 2026: ~90,000 tracks/day (50%+)
The response from Deezer is practical rather than sweeping. The company says it will remove AI-generated tracks that have had zero streams in the past six months, as well as those tied to fraudulent streaming activity designed to inflate payouts. The goal is to protect the royalty pool for real artists, which gets diluted every time a fake or unplayed track siphons money from the system.
Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier put it plainly: “Deezer has been at the frontline of fighting fraud and reducing payment dilution related to AI music for almost two years. 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 broader industry still has no agreed-upon approach to AI music. Different platforms have taken very different stances:
- Bandcamp has banned AI-generated tracks outright
- Tidal has cut off monetization for AI music
- Apple Music introduced a voluntary AI-tagging system
- Spotify developed its own policy around how much AI involvement is acceptable in a track
Deezer is somewhere in the middle. It has not banned AI music entirely, but it has built out real infrastructure to manage it. The platform started labeling AI-generated tracks last year and its detection technology can identify music made with tools like Suno and Udio, two AI music startups currently facing copyright lawsuits from major record labels.
Earlier this year, Deezer made that detection technology available to other platforms, though it is unclear whether any major service has actually adopted it. Last month, the company also released a tool that scans Apple Music and Spotify playlists for AI-generated content. That move suggests Deezer sees itself as something of an industry watchdog on this issue, not just managing its own catalog but trying to set a standard across the space.
The core tension here is money. AI music tools make it trivially easy to flood platforms with content, and every stream that goes to a generated track is a stream that does not go to a human artist. With streaming royalties already razor-thin, the math matters. If AI tracks make up half of all uploads but only a fraction of actual listening, they still drain the royalty pool just by existing. Deezer’s six-month zero-stream rule is a direct attack on that problem, cutting out the dead weight while leaving room for AI tracks that people actually choose to listen to.
