- Deezer announces over half of all daily music uploads are AI-generated
- The platform also announces stricter exclusion criteria for AI slop
- Deezer says AI slop is used largely for ‘streaming fraud’, and it’s cracking down
If you haven’t seen an AI slop commercial, social media post or minions meme then you’re lucky. I can’t say I’ve heard much AI-generated music (at least, that I’m aware of) but I try very hard to actively avoid it.
Despite this, major streaming service Deezer has announced that over half of all tracks uploaded to its library in June 2026 were slop songs. That’s over 90,000 new tracks, all of which weren’t made by people.
This is a big increase in a few months, as we heard in April that 44% of tracks were AI-made, and in December 30% of tracks were AI. That’s a rough rate of 3.3% increase every month, suggesting that October 2027 is when we could see Deezer hit the musical singularity.
Deezer knows all this because it’s been pioneering AI-detection tools, as seen in its AI slop playlist scanner. It also automatically detects and tags AI-made music, and excludes it from recommendations and playlists.
And the hammer is coming down harder going forward…
First steps in countering the tide
When the company shared these AI figures, Deezer also confirmed a few extra steps it was taking to counter the rising AI tide.
The streaming service has announced: “Moving forward, Deezer will systematically take down AI-tracks used for streaming fraud, and those that haven’t been streamed for at least 6 months”, which implies, perhaps optimistically, that there’s AI music not used for this purpose.
Streaming fraud is the bulk upload of low-quality churned-out music, to earn some quick cash. Think people scripting computers to generate songs — and I mean 1000s of songs at once — then uploading them in batches. Why do this? To overwhelm, flood and replace whatever human-made music might otherwise be there for your ears to discover, and rake in the streaming royalties because you just became a big fish.
To explain, artist payout from streaming services usually involves everyone getting a share of a large pie, with more streams ensuring you get a larger slice of the pie (money). Beyonce gets a bigger slice of the pie than, say, The Bedford Band (a bad example since we haven’t written a single track yet, but you get the idea).
Fraudsters upload massive amounts of AI music in the hopes that, if they even get a tiny number of listens on each track, the slice of the pie will scale up due to just how many AI slop tracks they put out.
It’s not clear how Deezer will identify AI-generated tracks as being used for streaming fraud, as opposed to… whatever other reason you’d create AI music for. It also remains to be seen whether this move will have a significant impact on the amount of AI tracks uploaded, or if it’ll be like scratching a layer of ice off a glacier.
But it’s still good to see a music streaming service try to contend with AI slop, instead of embracing it or just, well… ignoring it.
The best music players for all budgets
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/DUbQ3dZJaSoCWW5FH2Fob6-1066-80.png
Source link
tom.bedford@hotmail.co.uk (Tom Bedford)
