logoalt Hacker News

mjr00today at 4:41 PM2 repliesview on HN

I wonder how much of this even matters. Sounds like it doesn't (aside from taking up space on Deezer's drives).

> The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company.

Even pre-AI, music has always been a winners-take-most business. Per an article from 2022, the vast majority of artists have fewer than 50 monthly listeners[0], which I suspect is far lower now due to the flood of AI.

Not sure about Deezer, but for Spotify there is some kind of minimum to get you into any algorithmic rotation. People try to game this with bots, i.e. botted streams, but the problem with bots is that the accounts are bots, so the recommendations just become music for other bots, hence the part where 85% of the streams are botted. So it doesn't actually work, and you have to rely on old-fashioned promotion to get into any algorithmic playlists.

So 44% of uploads being AI-generated sounds bad, but it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever encounter them naturally, the same way that people don't naturally discover random, non-AI artists with 10 monthly listeners and tracks with less than 1000 plays. This isn't a defense of AI music slop, by the way; it's more pointing out that the "making a song" part only takes you about 20% of the way to becoming an artist people want to listen to. A harsh lesson our friends in /r/SunoAI are learning.

[0] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/over-75-of-artists-on...


Replies

CharlesWtoday at 4:59 PM

> …it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever encounter them naturally…

"Extremely unlikely", you say? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/13/ai-music-...

show 1 reply
rectangtoday at 4:58 PM

44% of uploads are probably not created by 44% of "artists". The core of people who are looking to exploit the system are going to be good at gaming the recommendation algorithm — they're specialists in it solely for the money who don't need to trouble themselves with artistic concerns.

show 1 reply