Deezer Reveals Nearly Half of New Songs on its Platform are AI Results

JAKARTA - The trend of using artificial intelligence or artificial intelligence (AI) in the global music industry has reached a point that is quite worrying and ironic.

French music streaming service Deezer has just released shocking data stating that almost half of the total songs uploaded to their service every day are the result of AI technology.

Despite the massive number, the reality on the ground shows that listeners are not interested in consuming non-human works widely.

Deezer notes that there are currently around 75,000 new AI-made tracks entering their system every day. This figure includes around 44 percent of the total daily uploads on the platform.

This spike is considered very extreme if you look at the company's historical data; in January last year, AI content only accounted for 10 percent, then climbed to 28 percent in September, until it finally reached 44 percent today.

This phenomenon proves that the technical barriers to producing music have collapsed, allowing anyone to flood the market with digital content in a short time.

Interestingly, the dominance of this quantity is not proportional to popularity. Deezer revealed that AI-generated songs currently account for only one to three percent of the total listening time of users overall.

This indicates a large gap between the volume of AI music production and the organic interest of the audience, who still seem to prefer authentic works from musicians.

In addition, Deezer is also firm in installing an AI detection tool from the beginning of 2025 to mark the content. This step is taken to ensure transparency for users while preventing royalties from being paid only to real musicians.

Deezer CEO, Alexis Lanternier, emphasized that this phenomenon is no longer just a marginal issue that can be ignored by stakeholders in the music industry. According to him, collective action is necessary to maintain the integrity of the art ecosystem.

"AI-generated music is now far from a marginal phenomenon and as daily submissions continue to increase, we hope that the entire music ecosystem will join us in taking action to help protect the rights of artists and promote transparency for fans," Lanternier said, quoted by NME, Tuesday, May 5.

He also added that thanks to the proactive steps taken since a year ago, his party has managed to minimize fraud related to AI and payments in the streaming system.

However, the challenge for listeners turns out to be much more complicated than imagined. Based on a study conducted by Deezer together with the research company Ipsos on 9,000 respondents in eight countries, it was found that 97 percent of people cannot distinguish between human-made music and AI music.

As many as 52 percent of respondents admitted that they felt uncomfortable when they did not know whether what they were hearing was real or machine-made, while 51 percent were concerned that excessive use of AI would produce music that sounded cheap and generic.

This condition underlies Deezer's move to remove algorithmic recommendations on AI content so that the ears of listeners are still protected from "digital garbage".

This decisive step was not only taken by Deezer. Spotify also recently confirmed that it had removed around 75 million songs that were categorized as spam and targeted accounts that imitated the identity of musicians.

This step follows various reports regarding the misuse of the profile of deceased musicians by irresponsible individuals to upload AI songs without permission.