Wack Wednesday: Deezer Just Built the 'No AI' Button Nobody Else Would

What Wack Wednesday Is

Every Wednesday, Song Reviews covers weird music on its own terms – novelty tracks, bizarre production, strange genre combinations, AI music, and whatever internet phenomenon currently qualifies. The reviews cover one song. The feature exists to name what’s actually going on across the week’s coverage, for readers who want the context before they click into the review itself.

What We’re Talking About Today

Two weeks ago, this column argued that the music industry’s AI lawsuits were all fighting over who gets paid when a model trains on a major label’s catalog, while nobody with real leverage was fighting over whether a listener deserves to know what they’re actually hearing. On October 13, a streaming platform did something about that second problem directly. Deezer announced an on/off toggle, rolling out before the end of the year, that lets a listener strip every fully AI-generated track, album, and artist out of their search results entirely – not a label, not a warning, an actual switch a listener can flip.

The scale behind that switch is the real story. Deezer’s patent-pending detection tool – built to catch output from Suno, Udio, and similar generators – has identified and pulled more than 42 million AI-generated tracks from the platform’s recommendations since January 2025. The company now receives close to 90,000 fully AI-generated tracks a day, more than half of everything submitted on a peak day, and those tracks accounted for the large majority of the platform’s detected streaming fraud in 2025 despite being a small slice of total streams. A Deezer/Ipsos survey found 45% of users want exactly this filter. CEO Alexis Lanternier framed the move plainly: “We remain committed to minimizing negative effects, while empowering our users to control their music experience.” That’s a streaming platform, not a court, doing the one thing two years of litigation between major labels and AI generators hasn’t touched – giving the listener the information and the choice.

What’s Wack

Here’s what makes this week different from two weeks ago: the disclosure gap this column flagged as the real frontier didn’t stay a hypothetical. This week’s review, “Papaoutai (Afro Soul)” – an AI-cloned vocal built over Stromae’s 2013 hit, with no involvement from Stromae or his label – is one of the actual tracks that forced the question. When it went viral in January, Deezer was the only major platform that labeled it as AI-generated content outright. Everywhere else, listeners who didn’t already know simply didn’t know, and the song still racked up more than 14 million streams and climbed into the top five of Billboard’s World Digital Song Sales chart regardless. Deezer’s new toggle is the scaled-up version of exactly the call it already made on this one song eleven months ago: not suing anybody, just telling the listener what they’re hearing and letting them decide if they still want it.

The part that’s still wack, even with a real fix finally arriving, is how long the gap stayed open and how much slipped through it in the meantime. Forty-two million flagged tracks and 90,000-a-day submissions didn’t happen because nobody noticed – they happened because for a full year, telling a listener the truth about what they were streaming was something exactly one platform bothered to do, while the rest of the industry argued in court about catalogs and training data instead. The toggle is the right move. It’s also an admission of just how large the thing left unaddressed had already gotten before anyone built a switch for it.

Hero image: a listener wearing headphones. Photo by Nickolai Kashirin, licensed under CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.