AI Is Flooding the Music Industry — But Is It Actually Making Music?

© Soundevote / Copyrighted

Soundevote Editorial

Something has shifted in music, and it didn't happen gradually. It happened fast, and most people are still catching up with what it actually means.

Platforms like Suno and Udio — tools that generate full tracks from a text prompt in seconds — have gone from novelty to industry flashpoint in under two years. Suno alone now has over 100 million people who have used the platform, with 2 million paid subscribers and $300 million in annual recurring revenue. The ads are everywhere — YouTube, Facebook, TikTok — all selling the same promise: you don't need talent, training, or even a DAW. Just type what you want and hit generate.

For casual listeners, that might sound exciting. For working artists and independent labels, it looks like something else entirely.

The Numbers Behind the Noise

The scale of what's being generated is genuinely difficult to process. Suno users generate approximately 7 million songs per day — the equivalent of Spotify's entire catalogue every two weeks. Most of that content isn't being made by producers with a vision. It's being pumped out by people chasing the royalty pool — and some of them aren't people at all. Spotify has discovered entire networks of bots designed to fraudulently boost the listenership of AI-generated music. In one documented case, a North Carolina man pleaded guilty to creating hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs and using automated bots to stream them billions of times, fraudulently obtaining more than $8 million in royalties. This isn't a future problem. It's happening right now.

Where Real Artists Stand

We asked ROMAN CIGI — London-based producer, DJ, and founder of Soundevote — for his honest take. His answer didn't sit on the fence.

"People generating tracks in Suno or Udio and uploading them directly to Spotify without ever touching a DAW — I don't consider that music production. You're typing a prompt and getting an output. That's not cutting samples, editing arrangements, or building a sound from scratch."

He's not dismissing AI as a tool entirely — he draws a personal line at around 15–20% AI assistance in a production, whether that's AI-aided mastering or sound processing. But beyond that, his position is clear.

"What genuinely concerns me is something bigger. One person can now run ten AI artist profiles, release music under fake identities, farm streams, and collect royalties. This isn't music — it's a content machine, and it devalues everything real artists put into their work."

The Industry Is Starting to Fight Back — But Slowly

Hundreds of artists — including Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry, and Stevie Wonder — raised copyright concerns in an open letter in 2024. The RIAA followed with lawsuits against both Suno and Udio, alleging mass copyright infringement on behalf of all three major labels. Spotify removed roughly 75 million tracks in a single sweep in 2025, targeting AI-generated content, stream farming operations, and duplicate uploads. Meanwhile, Deezer reports that AI-generated tracks now represent 44% of all newly uploaded music. The platforms are moving, but the volume arriving daily makes it an extremely difficult problem to contain.

Soundevote's Position

We're feeling it directly. Music submissions to Soundevote increasingly include AI-generated content — and the volume is growing. What was occasional is becoming routine, and it's getting harder to ignore what that means for the broader landscape. The music industry is starting to look less like a creative community and more like a content factory — and the corporate machines sitting behind these AI platforms have one priority: profit. Not music. Not artists. Not culture. Just growth, revenue, and selling you something else you don't need. It's a business model dressed up as democratisation, and the difference matters.

Technology has always changed music. That's not the argument. The argument is about what gets lost when the financial incentive to flood platforms outweighs any genuine creative intent. Music has always been the one thing that cuts through — through noise, through difficulty, through everything. What's being generated by the millions daily isn't that. It's the appearance of it.

We don't work with AI-generated artists, we don't release tracks built entirely by algorithms, and we never will. AI can be a small tool in the box — not the box itself.

AI isn't going away. Nobody serious is arguing that. But knowing what it is, how it works, and where it's being abused — that's what every artist and listener should be paying attention to right now. We'd rather be honest about where we stand than wait to see which way the wind blows.

👇 Follow Soundevote

Instagram

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest