Deezer says AI tracks now make up over 50% of daily uploads, triggering a purge

The floodgates are open. Deezer just dropped a staggering stat: more than half of all daily music uploads to its platform are now AI-generated, peaking at a monthly average of 90,000 tracks per day in June 2026. That’s not a trickle. That’s a takeover. The French streaming service has been tracking this since early 2025, when AI slop represented a mere 10% of daily uploads. The climb since then has been relentless — 18% in April 2025, 28% by September, 39% this January, and now, in April 2026, a sobering 44% before topping 50%.

Deezer’s response isn’t academic. CEO Alexis Lanternier announced a new housecleaning policy: AI-generated tracks that haven’t been streamed in six months, or are tied to fraudulent streaming schemes to juice royalties, will be taken down. “Now that half of all daily uploads are AI-generated tracks, we are taking additional steps to safeguard the rights of artists and songwriters,” Lanternier said. It’s an overdue acknowledgment that the sheer volume of synthetic music is diluting payouts for human artists. Real musicians are competing for pennies against an infinite army of ghosts.

The industry’s reaction to this deluge is a mess of contradictions. Bandcamp banned AI tracks outright. Tidal cut off their monetization. Apple Music nods at the problem with a voluntary tagging system, a move about as effective as an honor code at a bank heist. Deezer, meanwhile, is betting on detection. Its tool can spot tracks churned out by models from Suno and Udio, two startups currently fighting for their lives in copyright lawsuits. Deezer made that detection tech available to other platforms earlier this year, but no major player has publicly signed on. The silence is instructive.

What we’re watching is the collision of two inevitabilities: the plummeting cost of generating passable music and the streaming economy’s inability to gatekeep. Deezer’s purge is a tactical retreat, not a strategy. It cleans up the catalog’s long tail but does nothing to stop tomorrow’s 90,000 tracks. The real question isn’t whether AI music will keep growing — of course it will. It’s whether listeners will notice or care when their “chill lo-fi beats” playlist was written by no one at all.