Deezer says 44% of new music uploads are AI-generated, most streams are fraudulent

The real signal here isn't the 44% upload figure — it's that platforms are already building demonetization infrastructure to handle AI-generated content at scale, which means the royalty and licensing fight is no longer hypothetical. Deezer is essentially disclosing that it has become an adversarial system, filtering synthetic supply away from payouts.

This connects directly to the pattern visible in 'The App Store is booming again, and AI may be why' (TechCrunch, April 18): generative tools are collapsing the cost of producing artifacts, whether apps or audio tracks, and platforms are absorbing the volume consequences. The difference is that App Store growth looks like a healthy supply expansion, while Deezer's numbers describe a supply flood that listeners are actively ignoring. That asymmetry matters. Where AI-assisted development appears to be producing things people want, AI-generated music uploads are largely noise the market is already rejecting on its own, before any platform intervention.

Watch whether Spotify or Apple Music disclose comparable upload ratios in the next two quarters. If they do and their demonetization thresholds differ from Deezer's, that creates an arbitrage problem that will push fraudulent uploads toward whichever platform pays out most permissively.