Survey: People Don’t Want AI Music
In May, a bespectacled music mogul stood before a crowd of eager young graduates at the Middle Tennessee State University commencement ceremony. Scott Borchetta, who was the original record exec to sign Taylor Swift, praised the use of AI in music.He was promptly booed.
If surveys are any indication, the young graduates of Middle Tennessee State University aren’t alone.
A 2025 survey launched by French-founded music streaming platform Deezeremployed a sample size of 9,000 people across eight countries — the United States, Canada, Brazil, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Japan — to find out what people really think about AI in music.
First, the depressing news: When asked to distinguish between AI-generated songs and human-made songs, music listeners struggled to tell the difference. The survey had respondents listen to three tracks and pick out the fully AI-generated songs — 97% couldn’t do it.
The good news? When listeners know that a song is AI, they often reject it.
On Deezer, where they label fully AI-generated songs, AI music represents 44% of uploads but only 1-3% of actual streams. Apparently, the platform is flooded with AI songs — but few are listening.
Survey respondents also made clear they are on Team Human: A full 82% said that AI-generated music should be clearly labeled. They also worried that AI erodes the art itself. Almost two-thirds said they feared that AI could lead to a “loss of creativity in music production,” and 51% think that AI will lead to the creation of “more low-quality, generic-sounding music on streaming platforms.”
Another survey conducted by journalist Deni Ellis Béchard and neuroscientist Gabriel Kreiman for Scientific American, broadened the scope to creative media in general — music, movies, novels and paintings. Again, the audience’s view on AI was clear.
“The results were striking,” the authors wrote. “The majority of people who participated disliked the idea of AI-generated art and held the view that human art has an emotional depth that machines either can’t or shouldn’t reproduce.”
The authors designed a clever thought experiment. They asked respondents to think of their favorite piece of art — works like J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye; Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night”; the musical Hamilton; and music by the Beatles, Metallica and Cat Stevens. They then asked respondents to imagine those works were made by AI, with no humans involved. More than 67% of respondents said they would like the art less.
Human is practical
Diplo and his cohorts appear to believe that audiences are mere pigs at the trough — hungry for the fastest and the cheapest. But surveys suggest he’s wrong. The audience wants the real deal.
For musicians, expressing themselves was always the point. Like the18th-century Romantic poets who embraced emotional ecstasy over the mechanical logic of the Industrial Revolution, musicians like Telander declare that music “mirrors the soul.” But for those who care deeply about music — and may also want to make a living at it — the truth may be less romantic and more practical: Fans don’t want AI.