Tim Ingham Explores AI's Impact on Music Streaming

The AI Music Streaming Flood: Where We’re At

June 3, 2026 By Tim Ingham MBW Reacts is a series of analytical commentaries from Music Business Worldwide written in response to major recent entertainment events or news stories. Only MBW+ subscribers have unlimited access to these articles. The below originally appeared in Tim Ingham’s latest ‘Tim’s Take’ email, issued exclusively to MBW+ subscribers.

Nine months ago, I made a prediction .

I wagered that by the time the 2026 World Cup rolls around, fully AI-generated tracks could account for 50% of all music uploads to streaming services.

Eight days away from kick-off, I may yet be proven right.

In April, Deezer – the only major streaming platform that bothers to tell us when a track is machine-made – announced that it was now ingesting nearly 75,000 fully AI tracks every single day. That’s 44% of total daily uploads.

Here’s the bit of that announcement most of the subsequent commentary sailed past.

If 75,000 AI tracks are 44% of the daily intake, then Deezer’s total daily intake is currently running at roughly 170,000 tracks a day .

Importantly, the volume of human-made music among this mass has stopped growing; Deezer’s numbers imply that the number of tracks made by idiot fleshy hominids stood at ~90K in January 2025, and at ~95K in April 2026.

In other words, the AI flood hasn’t displaced the endless tsunami of new human music. It’s just been tipped on top of it.

Deezer’s total intake of daily music uploads has increased by some 70% in fifteen months – and virtually all of that increase is synthetic.

Now… multiply that across every DSP on earth.

Deezer’s daily upload mix, Jan 2025–Apr 2026. Source: Deezer filings / MBW.

A flood has a cost: and someone’s footing the bill

All of this music has to live on servers . And servers cost money.

We can put a reasonably firm estimate on Spotify ‘s annual bill for those servers, because the company told us once – quietly, in the small print of its pre-float accounts.

Buried in SPOT’s 2017 annual filing was a disclosure that, just before its IPO, the streamer signed a service agreement with Google for use of the Google Cloud Platform , with “total minimum payments during the first three years of service [of] approximately EUR €366 million “.

That’s a floor of roughly €122 million per year – for cloud infrastructure alone – from 2018–2020.

Spotify has never published a headline cloud figure since. But its annual reports still flag the steadily rising cost of the “cloud computing services” tucked inside its IT spend.

Add up those yearly movements and Spotify’s reported cloud and IT costs are running roughly EUR €183M (USD $200M) higher today than they were at IPO.

In FY2025 alone, the firm disclosed that these costs rose by EUR €30 million “due primarily to an increase in our usage of cloud computing services.”

The flood of AI content – music, but also AI video podcasts – now arriving on Spotify’s servers will only inflate that cost as time moves on.

In the grand scheme of things, this expense is not hugely material for SPOT investors; after all, the firm posted USD $2.5B in annual operating profit in 2025.

But it’s a nine-figure annual sum that shareholders will surely be watching closely as it escalates.

Source: Annual Spotify 20-F filings. Note: Until FY2023, Spotify fully attributed these IT expense figures to “cloud computing services and additional software license fees.” Since FY2025, it’s attributed them “primarily to our usage of cloud computing services.”

Deezer , for its part, has long grumbled about the expense of warehousing tracks that nobody plays. (Two years ago, it told investors, “There is a cost to having a never-ending growing catalog.”)

Last month, cost-conscious Deezer did something about it – confirming it has stopped storing hi-res versions of AI-generated tracks altogether.

This was something of a watershed moment: For the first time, a streaming service is now triaging which music is worth the disk space.

253 million tracks – and a graveyard

Just how much music is sitting on said servers?

According to Luminate ‘s latest annual report , global audio streaming platforms hosted over a quarter of a billion tracks at the close of 2025 – some 253 million .

I recently ran some additional sums on Luminate’s numbers , and what fell out is startling.

Some 55.3 million tracks hosted by global audio streaming services were played zero times in 2025.

Not “a few”. Not once. Zero.

Meanwhile, Luminate has confirmed that some 223.8 million of the 253 million – roughly 88% – were played fewer than 1,000 times apiece last year, across multiple platforms.

> “Some 55.3 million tracks hosted by global audio streaming services were played zero times in 2025.”

This was a graveyard before the robots even showed up.

Nine years ago I uploaded my own masterpiece, Pinky Hue , to prove how easy it was to game streaming – and discovered, to my lasting hurt, that no actual humans wanted to listen to it.

Now picture 170,000 Pinky Hues landing every day – over 62 million (!) tracks a year. More and more of them conjured by a machine… in the time it’s taken you to read this sentence.

Welcome to the music biz, 2026 edition!

Luminate’s annual numbers imply that 55.3M tracks sat on global audio streaming services in 2025… without receiving a single play on any platform

Spotify isn’t scared – it’s delighted.

You’d think the largest music subscription streaming platform might be a little alarmed by all this. You’d be wrong.

On Spotify’s April 28 earnings call, co-CEO Gustav Söderström was asked about the generative AI music deluge – and reframed it, with some skill, as the opposite of a problem.

“The generative market for music is [accelerating the production of] new music, which is happening at scale and quickly increasing [Spotify’s] catalog,” he said.

“We think that’s good for a company that aggregates content because it makes the recommendation problem even more important.”

Aka: The bigger the blob becomes, the more our users rely on us to navigate them through it.

Söderström noted that when he joined Spotify in 2008, the DSP’s catalog stood at about two million tracks; today, he confirmed, it’s around 250 million .

This 125X growth , in his telling, isn’t a threat – it’s the very thing that makes Spotify’s recommendation engine indispensable.

> “With this [new tool], one song becomes 10,000 songs, 100,000 songs… the catalog is going to not just expand, but multiply.” Alex Norström, Spotify, on the app’s new AI remix tool

Then, at Spotify’s investor day two weeks ago, co-CEO Alex Norström triumphantly discussed a new AI remix/covers tool, licensed by Universal Music Group .

Crucially, Spotify confirmed that the tracks created via this tool will be made available to all users of its app – free and paid.

How many new tracks are we talking about?

“Typically [today], one song can become three remixes, four mixes and maybe even five covers,” said Norström . “But with this [new tool], one song becomes 10,000 songs, 100,000 songs … the catalog is going to not just expand, but multiply.”

One song becomes 100,000 songs. Sit with that and its connotations.

Spotify is not frightened of the rapidly multiplying mass of online music.

In fact, it’s building tools to multiply it faster .

The second part of the latest ‘Tim’s Take’, tackling AI music labeling on DSPs, will be posted tomorrow (June 3). Music Business Worldwide

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_Originally reported by [Music Business Worldwide](https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/the-ai-music-streaming-flood-where-were-at/)._