Half of All Songs Uploaded to Deezer Are Now Made by AI
The music streaming service says AI-generated tracks hit 90,000 uploads a day in June 2026. Now it's starting to delete the ones nobody listens to.
Key points
- In June 2026, AI-generated music peaked at 90,000 tracks uploaded to Deezer every single day.
- AI tracks crossed 50% of all daily uploads to Deezer as of mid-2026, up from 10% in January 2025.
- Deezer will now remove AI tracks that have had zero streams in the past six months or that were used in streaming fraud.
- Deezer's detection tool can identify music made with Suno and Udio, two AI music generators currently facing copyright lawsuits.
Eighteen months ago, roughly one in ten songs uploaded to Deezer, the French music streaming service, was made entirely by an AI. Today it's one in two.
Deezer published figures this week showing the scale of the shift. In January 2025, about 10,000 AI-generated tracks arrived daily. By April 2026 that had risen to 75,000. June 2026 was the peak: 90,000 AI tracks uploaded every single day.
Deezer is now pushing back. The company says it will remove AI-generated tracks that nobody has streamed in the past six months, and any tracks caught in streaming fraud, where bots play a song repeatedly to generate royalty payments. That fraud hurts real musicians by diluting the shared pool that royalties come from.
"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," CEO Alexis Lanternier said in a statement.
Deezer already labels AI tracks, and its detection software can spot music generated by Suno and Udio, two AI music tools currently named in copyright lawsuits brought by major record labels. Both tools have faced intense scrutiny this summer: a hacker broke into Suno's systems in November 2025 and found source code suggesting the generator pulled audio from Deezer and YouTube without permission, and Sony filed a fresh case against Udio in July targeting more than 30,000 allegedly copied tracks. Earlier in 2026, Deezer made its detection tool available to other platforms, though it's not yet clear whether any major service has adopted it. Last month the company also released a separate tool that scans Apple Music and Spotify playlists to flag AI-generated songs.
Are human artists losing money because of this?
Yes, potentially. Streaming royalties work like a shared pie: every stream takes a slice. When millions of AI tracks rack up bot-driven plays, the slices going to real artists shrink. Deezer calls this "payment dilution," and it's the core reason the company is deleting low-engagement AI content.
Other services are handling this differently. Bandcamp bans AI-generated music outright, while Tidal blocks those tracks from earning any money. Apple Music asks uploaders to tag their music as AI-generated voluntarily. Spotify has its own policy on how much AI involvement is acceptable, first reported by TechCrunch AI.
If you're a musician, look for platforms that offer clear labelling options and transparent royalty breakdowns, so you can see whether AI flooding is affecting your earnings. The deletion policy is a start, but it only targets tracks nobody plays: the ones accumulating bot streams remain the harder problem to crack.
