AI music is flooding streaming services — but who wants it?

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 startedThe 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