AI is taking over the music industry: about a quarter of creators’ income could be cut

According to the company’s statement, about 75 thousand songs created using artificial intelligence are uploaded to the service every day, a figure that represents about 44% of all new content. On a monthly basis, this is more than 2 million songs. This figure indicates a particularly sharp increase, since at the beginning of 2025 the number of songs was only about 10 thousand per day.

Despite the large scale of the offer, the listening data shows a completely different picture. Only between 1% and 3% of plays on the platform are attributed to songs created by artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, according to the company, up to 85% of these broadcasts are identified as fraud, that is, artificial activity intended to increase profits illegally. As a result, these listenings are not eligible for royalties.

One of the main actions taken by the company is the clear marking of songs created using artificial intelligence. This is a relatively unusual move in the industry, where Deezer is the only one that publicly declares such identification and marking. At the same time, such songs are removed from automatic recommendations and do not enter official playlists, in order to avoid affecting the distribution of royalties.

The company has developed a dedicated identification system based on advanced technology that allows identifying unique signatures of synthetic content. The tool is able to recognize works created using common artificial intelligence models, and even recognize content even without a specific training database. Since its launch, more than 13.4 million such songs have been identified and tagged.

At the same time, Deezer began offering its identification technology under licensing to other parties in the industry, in an attempt to create a broader standard to deal with the phenomenon. The move comes against the background of estimates that by 2028 the industry may lose about a quarter of the creators’ income, an amount estimated at about 4 billion euros.

The new data also joins the findings of an international survey, according to which 97% of listeners fail to distinguish between music created by humans and that created by artificial intelligence. However, 80% of respondents believe that such songs should be clearly marked.