Almost a fifth of all new music uploaded to streaming platform Deezer is AI-generated, the company said today. Deezer is receiving more than 20,000 new AI-generated songs every single day, almost double what the company was getting just three months ago, in January, when only 10% of all submitted songs were AI-generated.

“AI generated content continues to flood streaming platforms like Deezer, and we see no sign of it slowing down,” Aurelien Herault, Deezer’s chief innovation officer said in a statement.

Though there’s no sign of the flood abating, Deezer does have automated checks in place to detect AI-generated music. The company says its AI music detection tool can find 100% AI-generated songs from the most common AI music generation tools. However, some music is partially human-created and partially AI-created, and there are many different generative AI music creation tools.

A common challenge with AI-generated music is that it may have been trained on copyrighted material.

Deezer says it’s the only platform to have signed the global statement on AI training, which says that "the unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.”

(Journalists, whose work has been extensively used for years to train hundreds of generative AI models in language, reasoning, as well as general facts about what is going on in the world, can only smile when reading that.)

AI-generated music is still a minority of the 100,000-plus songs uploaded to Deezer every day, but at the current growth rate, it could soon be the vast majority.

In January, the company said it made “incredible progress” in releasing “the best AI detection tool on the market.” The goal is to protect music creators’ revenue, which is about $16 billion annually. Deezer says a quarter of that is at risk by 2028.

It’s easy to see why. Currently there are over 100 generative AI tools for making music, including text to music generators like YouTube’s Music Assistant, Google’s Dream Track, or Meta’s MusicGen. OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, has MuseNet and Jukebox.

There are also AI composition and arrangement tools like AIVA and MusicLM, and AI plugins for music production workflows like LANDR and TAIP, or Synthesizer V. Plus, of course, there are voice-cloning and AI vocal tools like Suno, Udio, or Supertone.

According to Market.us, the global AI in music market could be worth about $39 billion by 2033, up from almost $4 billion in 2023. That’s a compound annual growth rate of an astonishing 26%.

According to the report, 60% of musicians are embracing AI for music creation and production. Which means, if true, that the people who are making the new AI-generated music might be the same people platforms like Deezer are trying to protect from AI-generated music.

Where Deezer seems to draw the line is fully AI-generated music.

“Generative AI has the potential to positively impact music creation and consumption, but we need to approach the development with responsibility and care in order to safeguard the rights and revenues of artists and songwriters, while maintaining transparency for the fans," says Herault. "Thanks to our cutting-edge tool we are already removing fully AI generated content from the algorithmic recommendations.”

The message?

AI help is fine. Human replacement, not so much.