The music industry just got a rude wake-up call: 97% of people can’t tell the difference between human-made and AI-generated tracks, according to a new study from French streaming platform Deezer and research firm Ipsos. The survey, which polled 9,000 listeners across eight countries, landed last month like a brick through the industry window. More than half of respondents (52%) felt genuinely uncomfortable about failing to spot the AI tracks—but discomfort isn’t stopping anything.
Deezer now receives 50,000 fully AI-generated songs daily—accounting for more than one-third of all new music submitted to the platform. That’s up from 10,000 tracks in January 2025. In September, the platform was logging 30,000 AI tracks per day. By November, it hit 50,000. This isn’t a slow burn; this is full combustion.
The proof is in the chart. An AI-generated country song called “Walk My Walk” by Breaking Rust—featuring synthetic vocals with no credited human singer—hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart in late October, staying at the top for multiple weeks. No live band. No verified human artist. Just algorithms and code cranking out hits.
While no official statement confirms Breaking Rust is entirely AI-generated, AI identification tools estimated 60-90% probability that the track was generated, and the songwriting credit traces to Def Beats AI, an openly AI-driven music project. The artist maintains no public identity, no interviews, no live appearances—just verified Spotify followers and chart dominance.
The real killer? 70% of streams for fully AI-generated tracks on Deezer are detected as fraudulent—automated bot plays designed to pump up numbers and divert royalties away from actual artists. That’s where this gets darker than just “AI sounds pretty good now.”
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The Fraud Machine Never Stops
Bad actors generate thousands of songs with AI tools like Suno and Udio, then deploy bot networks to stream them millions of times, creating artificial demand. One North Carolina musician named Michael Smith was charged federally with exactly this scheme—using hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs with fake artist names like “Calorie Screams” and “Zygotic Washstands,” then streaming them billions of times via bot accounts to pull over $10 million in royalties across seven years. Prosecutors called it the first criminal case of its kind. 1
The streaming economics make it obvious why. Spotify paid out $10 billion to rights holders in 2024, up from $1 billion a decade earlier. That creates incentive. Bad actors see that and see opportunity.
Spotify responded in September by removing over 75 million “spammy” tracks from its platform over the past 12 months, part of a broader crackdown announced in late September 2025. The company introduced three policy pillars: improved enforcement against voice impersonation, a spam filtering system targeting mass uploads and duplicates, and a new industry standard (DDEX) for AI disclosures in music credits.
“At its worst,” Spotify stated plainly, “AI can be used by bad actors and content farms to confuse or deceive listeners, push ‘slop’ into the ecosystem, and interfere with authentic artists working to build their careers”.
What People Actually Want (Transparency, Mostly)
Here’s the public sentiment: 80% of listeners surveyed want AI-generated music clearly labeled. 73% of streaming users want to know when platforms are recommending synthetic tracks. This isn’t opposition to AI music. This is demand for basic honesty. 2
70% of respondents believe AI threatens musicians’ income. 69% think AI-generated tracks should pay out less than human-made music. Meanwhile, 66% say they’d listen to AI-generated music at least once out of curiosity, but 45% want the ability to filter it out completely. The public isn’t anti-tech; they’re anti-being-played.
The deeper anxiety is real: according to a global study commissioned by CISAC and conducted by PMP Strategy, music creators could see 24% of their revenues at risk by 2028—representing a cumulative loss of €10 billion ($16 billion AUD) over five years. That’s not speculation. That’s a formal economic projection based on market modeling. 3
Artists Are Divided (Mostly Vocal About Concerns)
The music world response ranges from outright refusal to cautious experimentation. While some artists like producer will.i.am and Timbaland have tested AI tools as creative assists, concerns dominate. More than 1,000 musicians—including Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, and Damon Albarn—released a silent album to protest proposed UK laws they felt would strip artists of creative control over AI use of their voices.
The Velvet Sundown situation made this concrete. The band, which went viral on Spotify with over 900,000 monthly listeners in June 2025, eventually admitted in their bio: “This is a synthetic music initiative steered by human creative insight, and crafted, vocalized, and visualized with the aid of artificial intelligence”—basically confirming what everyone suspected.
Reddit and Social Media: The Real Debate
On Reddit forums and Twitter, the actual argument is more nuanced than “AI bad.” In communities like r/Songwriting, moderators faced serious questions about whether to allow AI submissions at all. 4
One camp: “AI music lacks authenticity. It cannot truly feel or live or experience life the way a human artist does.” Not wrong about emotional resonance.
Other camp: “If you approach it as a tool rather than spam generation, it can be genuinely beneficial.” They point out that synthesizers, drum machines, and AutoTune all faced the same pushback before becoming standard.
A recurring Reddit complaint captures the quality issue: “Most of this content is unbearable. It’s an uncanny valley of sound that few want to discover.” Yet the transparency demand cuts across both sides: “AI-generated content should be clearly labeled. Many people don’t even know what they’re consuming, and that’s the critical issue”.
The Path Forward
The Deezer-Ipsos survey reveals something worth noting: 98% of people have heard of AI music, but only 19% trust it—curiosity vastly outweighs confidence. Nearly two-thirds believe AI will flood platforms with low-quality tracks. 5
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Deezer itself took the hardline approach: 100% of AI-generated tracks are excluded from algorithmic recommendations and editorial playlists, explicitly tagged, and filtered from royalty calculations. It remains the only major streaming service doing this systematically.
The industry’s future probably involves hybrid models. AI assists human producers who then perform, refine, and inject actual emotion into final tracks. AI as creative fuel—beat generation, vocal layering, production assistance—not replacement. Whether that distinction survives the incentive structures for fraud remains the question. 6
The uncomfortable truth: most of you won’t even know you’re listening to AI music. And the people profiting from it are betting you won’t care. That’s the real story—not that AI can fool 97% of people, but that fraudsters are already using that fact to build empires while the industry argues about authenticity.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/05/nyregion/nc-man-charged-ai-fake-music.html ↩︎
- https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/50000-ai-tracks-flood-deezer-daily-as-study-shows-97-of-listeners-cant-tell-the-difference-between-human-made-vs-fully-ai-generated-music/ ↩︎
- https://www.cisac.org/Newsroom/news-releases/global-economic-study-shows-human-creators-future-risk-generative-ai ↩︎
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Songwriting/comments/1lq1ca9/open_discussion_ai_music_the_future_of_this/ ↩︎
- https://newsroom-deezer.com/2025/11/deezer-ipsos-survey-97-of-people-cant-tell-the-difference-between-fully-ai-generated-and-human-made-music-clear-desire-for-transparency-and-fairness-for-artists/ ↩︎
- https://www.themusicnewsblitz.com/news/ai-generated-hits-are-we-listening-to-real-artists ↩︎
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