Last July, Deezer revealed a number that should have made far more noise: at certain points, more than 50% of new tracks delivered daily to the platform were entirely AI-generated. The monthly average: around 90,000 AI tracks per day.

Sound is becoming an industrial raw material. Abundant, fast, nearly free to produce.

For many artists, that number is frightening. I understand why.

But I want to offer a different way to read it.

What everyone believes

AI will drown independent artists. It will make human music invisible. It will destroy already fragile streaming revenues. It will make the market even more unfair than it already is.

This narrative is understandable. And it isn’t entirely wrong.

But it misses something essential about what AI is actually changing.

What’s really happening

When a resource becomes abundant, what becomes scarce is its opposite.

Water is precious in a desert. Water from a tap barely registers as valuable. It’s not that water became less useful, it’s that scarcity moved.

That’s exactly what’s happening with AI-generated music.

When sound becomes infinite, attention becomes the scarce resource. And what captures attention, genuinely, durably,  is no longer a well-produced audio file. It’s a story. An identity. A recognisable human presence.

AI can generate 90,000 tracks a day. It cannot generate provenance.

Provenance: knowing where something comes from, who created it, why, and in what context. It’s what transforms a sound into a work — and a listener into a fan.

Major labels know this. Platforms are starting to understand it. The legal disputes multiplying around AI music, some now involving major tech players, aren’t only about rights. They’re about a deeper question: does music have different value depending on whether it was lived or calculated?

For an increasingly aware audience, the answer is yes.

What this changes for you

If attention is the new scarce resource, then the question is no longer “how do I produce more” or “how do I release more often”. The question becomes: what are you building that cannot be generated?

Here is what AI cannot do for you.

Your artistic identity. What makes you recognisable in three seconds of listening, at a glance, in a single sentence of bio. AI can imitate styles. It cannot be you.

Your story. The decisions you’ve made, the influences you carry, the moments that shaped the way you make music. This cultural and human context is what gives meaning to what you create and meaning cannot be generated.

Your community. An audience built over time, following you because they trust you, returning because they identify with your world. It can’t be bought. It can’t be generated. It has to be grown.

Your live presence. The concert, the acoustic session, the moment shared in person. Physical experience remains the one format AI cannot replicate. And it gains value as everything else dematerialises.

Your direct fan relationships. Email, community, messages, encounters. These direct connections — outside algorithms, outside intermediary platforms — are what ensures a part of your audience truly belongs to you, whatever happens.

In a market saturated with generated sounds, the artists who will build something lasting won’t be the ones who produce fastest. They’ll be the ones who built something irreplaceable: a clear identity, an engaged community, and a relationship of trust with their audience.

The action to take this week

One question: if someone heard your music for the first time today — no name, no bio — would they recognise something unique?

If the answer is unclear, that’s where everything starts.

Not with production. Not with promotion. With the clarity of who you are artistically — and the ability to make that visible, consistent, and impossible to confuse with anyone else.

This is exactly what I work on with artists. And it is, more than ever, the most strategic work an artist can do in 2026.

If the answer to this question is still unclear, the Streaming Pro Accelerator is the right place to clarify it.