Deezer Plans Switch To Hide Fully AI-Made Music From Search

Deezer announced a new switch that would let listeners keep fully AI-generated music out of their search results.

The planned setting would hide tracks, albums and related artists. Deezer planned to launch it worldwide before the end of 2026. Fans could turn it off to see those results again. Deezer said the switch would target songs made wholly by AI. Songs made by humans with limited AI help fell outside that scope.

The October 13 news built on steps Deezer had already taken. The company said it kept more than 42 million AI-made tracks out of its song suggestions from January 2025 through August 2026. It had labeled more than 14 million albums as AI-made and received nearly 90,000 fully AI-made tracks a day.

Fans had asked for that choice. In a November 2025 Ipsos poll backed by Deezer, 45% of streaming users surveyed wanted the option to hide fully AI-made songs.

Artists’ pay was also at stake. In a separate U.S. case last week, federal prosecutors said Michael Smith got 18 months in prison for a scheme that took more than $8 million in royalties.

Smith pleaded guilty to a wire fraud conspiracy in March. He had used software to run thousands of fake accounts. He spread their plays across a huge group of songs to make the scam harder to catch.

Those bots played his AI-made songs billions of times. Streaming payouts came from shared funds, so those bogus plays drew money away from artists whose music people had chosen to hear. The Justice Department said the scheme ran from 2017 to 2024.

Streaming services also drew different lines around what their AI labels meant. Spotify announced an AI Persona badge in August to flag artist profiles that looked human but might not represent a real person. It said it would keep those personas out of song suggestions by default, with exceptions when fans followed them.

Spotify said, “This badge is about the artist’s public identity, not about how the music was made.”

It used separate AI credits so artists could tell fans which parts of a song involved AI.

Artists also had a chance to appeal when Spotify’s review team put the persona badge on a profile. The label could come from the artist’s own account of who they were or from that review.

Deezer did not give a precise launch date in the announcement.