Deezer says more than half of the music uploaded to its service every day is now fully AI-generated, about 90,000 tracks a day this summer. Those tracks make up only 1–3% of streams, and Deezer says 85% of those streams were fraudulent last year.
Real people choosing to listen to AI music is closer to a rounding error. AI keeps making high-fidelity music easier to conjure, and demand still hasn’t moved, which I’d love to read as proof that people can hear the difference, except I’ve played enough half-empty clubs to know listeners are loyal to whatever’s playing, and some quiet part of me suspects that once the artificial stuff gets good enough (and cheap enough, and endless enough), most people will like it fine.
This was originally posted as an Observation in Paper Towns · The Catalog · №013, an issue of my weekly newsletter The Catalog. You can Subscribe for weekly insights, or get in touch to talk about what this means for your business.