Transcript: Episode 8 - 75,000 Fake Songs a Day, And Nobody's Stopping It

Hey, welcome back to Tech 4 Grown-Ups. I'm Michael, and today I want to talk about music, not in a nostalgic way, not in a things were better back in my day conversation, although honestly, by the time we're done today, you might feel that way a little bit. I want to talk about what's happening right now on the streaming platforms you probably use every single day.

Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and I want to talk about what it reveals about us, about creativity, about what we've quietly started to accept without anyone really asking our permission, because something is happening to music and most people have no idea. A few weeks ago, Deezer, one of the major music streaming platforms, published a report, and buried in that report was a number that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. 44% of all new music being uploaded to their platform is AI generated.

Let that sit for a second. Not 4%, not some niche corner of the internet where tech people experiment with weird stuff. 44% of all music on a platform that millions of people use.

That works out to roughly about 75,000 AI generated songs uploaded every single day. Here's the part that takes it from interesting to genuinely disturbing. When Deezer looked at the streaming numbers on those AI tracks, 85 of those streams were flagged as fraudulent, meaning they weren't real listeners.

They were bots. Automated systems streaming fake songs to collect real royalty money. So what we're actually describing here isn't just an AI story.

It's a fraud story. It's a scam. A digital con running in plain sight on platforms that charge you every month for the privilege.

And the real musicians, the people who spent years developing their craft, who poured actual pieces of their lives into their songs, they're watching their royalties get diluted by machines and bots while the platforms look the other way. Now here's what Robert Green would call the hidden dynamic in this situation, because there's always a hidden dynamic. There's always someone benefiting from the confusion.

Deezer, to their credit, is at least talking about this. They're labeling AI music. They're calling on other platforms to do the exact same.

Spotify is not doing this. Apple Music is not doing this. Amazon Music, you can guess, is not doing this.

And here's the green question worth asking. Why not? These are not unsophisticated companies. They are not unaware of what's happening on their own platforms.

They have the data. They have the technology to detect AI-generated content. They are choosing not to act.

Why would a company choose not to protect the integrity of its own product? Because the product isn't the music. The product is your attention and your monthly subscription fee. And as long as you keep paying, as long as the platform has something to fill your playlists with, whether it's real or not, the economic incentive to clean house is surprisingly small.

That's not cynicism. That's just reading the incentive structure honestly. Green would tell you never ask what someone says their motivation is.

Ask what they gain from their current behavior. What do the platforms gain from silence? Content, cheaply at scale. What do you lose? The real thing.

But here's where I want to slow down because the fraud angle is important and we'll come back to it. But there's a deeper question underneath all of this. Have we've gotten lazy about creativity? Not just the platforms.

Not just the bad actors gaming the system. Us. Ryan Holiday writes in Ego is the Enemy about the difference between being a student of something and merely consuming it.

The student shows up with humility, with patience, with genuine curiosity. The consumer just wants the output as quickly and as painlessly as possible. I think about that distinction when I think about what's happening to music.

We grew up, most of us listening to this podcast right now, during arguably the richest creative era in popular music history. The 60s, the 70s, the 80s. Artists who had something to say and developed the craft to say it.

Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, Johnny Cash, Led Zeppelin, Aretha Franklin. That music didn't come from a prompt. It came from a life being lived.

From heartbreak and joy and anger and longing and the specific irreplaceable experience of being a particular human being in a particular moment in history. You cannot fake that. You can imitate it, though.

You can produce something that sounds technically similar, that hits the right notes in the right order, that the algorithm will serve you without complaint. But imitation is not the real thing. And I think somewhere along the way, quietly, without much debate, we started accepting imitation in places where we used to demand authenticity.

Now, I was talking with a woman in our community recently, a retired music teacher. She's spent 30 years in classrooms teaching kids how to really listen, not just hear, but to listen to the music. I told her about the Deezer numbers.

She went quiet for a moment, and then she said, music was the one place I thought we were still safe. And I understood exactly what she meant. Because music was always the one that felt immune to this.

Writing could be faked. Images could be faked. Video, increasingly now, can be faked.

But music, real music, felt like it was required something that couldn't be automated. A human being who had felt something, and now even that line is getting blurry. Now, Marcus Aurelius wrote, the impediment to action advances action.

What stands in the way becomes the way. He wrote that during a plague, during wars on multiple fronts, and during a reign that was, by any reasonable measure, relentlessly difficult. And his answer, every time, was not to despair about the obstacle.

It was to let the obstacle clarify what actually mattered. I think that's the right frame here. The flood of AI-generated music is an impediment.

It's noisy, fraudulent, hollow. It's designed to exploit a broken system, not to move anyone. But it also does something the people running that exploit didn't intend.

It makes the real thing more visible by contrast. When everything around it is manufactured, when your playlist is increasingly filled with technically competent nothing, the song that was pulled from a real human experience stands out. The voice that has lived something stands out.

Your taste, the accumulated decades of listening, of being moved by certain songs, of knowing immediately when something is true and something and something it is not, that is not obsolete. That is the compass. And no amount of AI can replicate the judgment of a person who has spent a lifetime developing it.

Okay, so let's bring this down to earth for a second. Because I know some of you are thinking, Michael, this is all very philosophical. What do I actually do about it? And that's fair.

Here's what you can actually do. One, pay attention to who made what you're listening to. If an artist has no biography, no social presence, no story, and the music sounds oddly generic, it may be AI-generated filler designed to collect royalty money, not to move you.

Two, support real artists directly when you can. Buy a concert ticket, purchase an album, follow them on social media. The streaming royalty system was broken before AI even arrived.

Don't let bots make it worse. Now, three, demand better from your platforms. Spotify and Apple Music have the technology to detect and label AI content.

They're choosing not to use it. That is worth saying out loud and in reviews and emails and in your own community conversations. Four, stay curious about what you're actually consuming.

This is a digital literacy issue. You have the right to know whether what you're listening to was made by a human being or generated by a machine in three seconds to game a royalty system. You're not powerless here.

You're just informed now. Here's where I land on all of this. AI music is here.

It isn't going away. And some of it used well by artists who have something real to say and are using the tools honestly. Some of it will be worth hearing.

But the 75,000 daily uploads Deezer is describing, that's not creativity, that's exploitation. And the platforms hosting it while doing nothing are complicit in a fraud that harms real musicians, many of whom have spent their whole lives in service of something true. Seneca wrote, and he wrote this 2000 years ago, mind you, which tells you something about how permanent the insight is.

It takes the whole of life to learn how to live. Not most of a life, the whole of it. A machine has not lived.

And the music that moves you, the song that pulls you back to a moment, to a person, to a version of yourself, you thought you'd forgotten. That came from someone who had. Hold on to that.

It's more valuable than anyone in Silicon Valley wants you to believe. Now that's it for today. I genuinely love to know what you think about this one.

When you're listening to music, does it matter to you whether a human made it? Have you noticed something feeling off in your playlist lately? Do you, and do you think we've quietly started accepting good enough in places where we used to demand the real thing? Drop a comment wherever you're listening from or listening on and come find me over at Tech 4 Grown-Ups as T E C H the number four grownups.com. The full blog post on this topic is up and it's up on the site this week with all the data and the platform breakdown and the full picture. The link is in the show notes as well. And if this conversation was useful, share it with someone who loves music because this affects all of us, whether we know it yet or not.

I'm Michael and this is Tech 4 Grown-Ups. Take care of yourselves and I'll talk to you next week.