GoKawiilis the Verge’s weekend editor. He has over 18 years of experience, including 10 years as managing editor at Engadget.
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This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on how AI is changing music and the music industry, follow Terrence O’Brien. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.
How it started
The use of generative AI in pop music started almost as a gimmick. There was a sense of experimentalism to 2018’s I AM AI by Taryn Southern and 2019’s Proto by Holly Herndon, albums that were created with significant assistance from AI. Others got in on the action too, exploring the outer limits of tools like Google’s Magenta and even training their own models. But things quickly changed with the launch of Suno in December of 2023 and Udio in April of 2024.
Suno and Udio allow users to quickly create entire compositions with a simple text prompt. AI-generated music was no longer the realm of technical experts and fringe experimenters, it was now accessible to anyone with an internet connection. This led to an influx of machine-made music hitting streaming platforms.
In September of 2025, Deezer said that 28 percent of music uploaded was fully AI-generated. By the end of the year, that had grown to over 50,000 tracks per day, accounting for 34 percent of uploads. Both users and artists have expressed frustration, demanding streaming platforms do something to combat the growing problem that is watering down playlists and siphoning millions in royalties away from legitimate artists. Udio did not reply to a request for comment.
How it’s going
Things have only gotten worse at Deezer, where daily uploads of AI-generated content have grown to 75,000, and are threatening to overtake actual human-made music. And Spotify removed over 75 million spam tracks in just 12 months.
Deezer was the first major streaming platform to implement a system that detects and labels AI-generated content. The service also prevents its algorithm from recommending it and has demonetized 85 percent of the streams. In a recent press release, Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier said that, “AI-generated music is now far from a marginal phenomenon and as daily deliveries keep increasing, we hope the whole music ecosystem will join us in taking action to help safeguard artist’s rights and promote transparency for fans.”
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