Artificial intelligence multiplied the creation of songs and books on a scale never seen before, yet the day still holds twenty-four hours. Deezer receives close to seventy-five thousand fully artificial tracks every single day. On Spotify, eighty-eight percent of tracks play fewer than a thousand times a year. Millions of works are born condemned to absolute silence. Supply grew without limits. Human attention did not.
A factory that never sleeps
By: Gabriel E. Levy B.
Cultural production soared thanks to generative tools such as Suno and Udio, while the time audiences have available stays frozen. The result is an economy of abundance sitting on top of a biological bottleneck.
For decades, recording and releasing music demanded studios, labels and budgets. That filter is gone. Today anyone describes an idea in a text box and a tool like Suno or Udio returns a complete song in under a minute. The French platform Deezer revealed in 2025 that it receives around seventy-five thousand fully AI-generated tracks each day, a figure that represents close to forty-four percent of everything uploaded to its catalog. A year earlier, that share barely touched ten percent.
The leap does not happen in music alone. Amazon had to slow the flood of artificial books in its Kindle store. In September 2023 the company capped at three the titles an author can publish per day and required creators to declare the use of artificial intelligence. The measure arrived after fake guides, invented biographies and even survival manuals with dangerous data appeared, all signed by authors who never existed.
The bottleneck has a name: time
The economist Herbert Simon warned about this in 1971. When information becomes abundant, it consumes what is scarce, and what is scarce is the attention of whoever receives that information. Half a century later, his diagnosis describes the current problem with precision. We can manufacture songs without limit, but nobody manufactured extra hours in the day.
An average listener spends around twenty hours a week listening to music, according to recent industry measurements. That number barely moves year after year. Humanity’s capacity to consume is a container of fixed size. Production, by contrast, behaves like an open tap with no cap. The arithmetic turns cruel: when supply multiplies tenfold and demand stays flat, most works split an ever thinner slice of plays.
The desert of zero plays
The data confirms the size of the desert. Luminate’s annual report for 2024 found that of the more than two hundred million tracks available across streaming services, an overwhelming fraction gets very few plays or none at all. For 2025, several analyses estimated that close to eighty-eight percent of tracks logged fewer than a thousand plays across the whole year. Millions of songs never sounded even once.
The case of The Velvet Sundown illustrated the phenomenon in 2025. This band amassed more than a million monthly listeners on Spotify before it emerged that both its music and its members were artificial creations. Other projects climbed the charts before the platforms acknowledged the deception. These episodes show that the problem is not only volume, but the growing difficulty of telling the human apart from the synthetic.
Who loses when everyone publishes
Saturation hits flesh-and-blood emerging artists hardest. They compete for the same scarce ear against an infinite stream of content produced at no cost and with no fatigue. Recommendation algorithms, designed to concentrate attention on a few winners, widen the gap. Whoever already has visibility multiplies it. Whoever starts out vanishes into the endless tail of the catalog.
The money also thins out. Under the pro-rata revenue split most platforms use, the royalty pool divides among a growing number of works. Each new track, human or artificial, shrinks everyone else’s share. The International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, CISAC, projected that by 2028 close to twenty-four percent of music creators’ income would be at risk from the advance of generative artificial intelligence.
The response is only beginning
Platforms started to react. Spotify announced in 2025 new rules against impersonation, filters to detect mass spam uploads and a system for declaring AI-generated content. Deezer rolled out tags that flag fully synthetic albums and decided to exclude them from its editorial recommendations. These measures attack the symptoms, but they do not solve the underlying equation.
For Latin America the challenge carries its own nuance. The region produces enormous cultural wealth with limited resources, and its creators depend on digital discovery to exist. In a global catalog flooded with artificial content, the voice of a musician from Barranquilla or a writer from Medellín risks being buried under tons of mass-produced material. Human curation, local platforms and public support policies gain a value that once seemed secondary.
The day will still hold twenty-four hours. The question is no longer how much we can create, but what deserves our scarce time.
In summary
Artificial intelligence pushed the creation of music and books to unprecedented levels, while human attention stays limited by the twenty-four hours of the day. Deezer receives seventy-five thousand artificial tracks daily and most streaming tracks barely play. Abundance dilutes income and buries emerging creators. The truly scarce resource is no longer content, but the time of whoever consumes it.
References
CISAC. (2024). Global economic study: The economic impact of generative AI in the music and audiovisual industries. Confédération Internationale des Sociétés d’Auteurs et Compositeurs.
Deezer. (2025). Deezer detects surge in AI-generated music delivered to its platform [Press release]. Deezer S.A.
Luminate. (2025). 2024 year-end music report. Luminate Data.
Simon, H. A. (1971). Designing organizations for an information-rich world. In M. Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, communications, and the public interest (pp. 37-72). Johns Hopkins Press.
Spotify. (2025). Strengthening our platform for artists and songwriters in the age of AI [Press release]. Spotify Technology S.A.