What YouTube is doing
YouTube Music began rolling out a label on 14 October that marks songs created primarily with generative AI — the case where a model composes the track and produces the vocals. The label sits on the track’s player page, and tapping it opens a menu with more detail. YouTube says the labels will also come to the main YouTube app, without giving a date. “Our listeners have told us they want transparency when they’re hearing an AI-generated track,” the company wrote.
The three states are set out in YouTube’s help documentation for music partners: Fully Gen AI (“All content was created using Generative AI”), Partly Gen AI (“Part of the content was created using Generative AI”) and No Gen AI (“No content was created using Generative AI”).
Who actually decides
The interesting part is where the answer comes from. Music partners declare it when they deliver content — through DDEX ERN 4.3.2 and later, through CSV delivery templates, or by setting the attribute in YouTube Studio. In the CSV route the field is contains_ai and the accepted values are “all”, “partly”, “none” and “unknown”. If a partner supplies no value, YouTube treats the status as unknown unless it can work it out from other signals. The company says it worked with music partners and uses its own detection tools alongside the declarations.
The policy is disclosure rather than restriction. AI involvement alone does not make a track ineligible for monetisation.
Deezer is going further
The same week, Deezer said it is building a toggle that removes AI-generated music from a listener’s experience altogether — turning it on will stop AI-generated tracks, albums and related artists appearing in search results. The company expects it before the end of the year. “We’ve seen clear user demand for the ability to filter out AI-generated music,” chief executive Alexis Lanternier said, citing a survey last year in which around 45% of Deezer customers wanted a way to remove AI music from their feeds.
Deezer has the numbers to explain why. It added AI-detection tooling last year, when AI-generated tracks were about 10% of daily uploads. In July it said more than 50% of daily uploads were AI-generated, averaging about 90,000 tracks a day.
Where everyone else stands
Bandcamp has banned AI tracks outright. Tidal cut off monetisation for people uploading AI music. Spotify tags AI tracks and artists more prominently rather than restricting them. Variety reported in August that Apple Music was looking to label AI tracks by the end of the year.
What to watch
Labels only mean something if the declarations are accurate, and the declarations come from the people uploading the music. The thing to watch is what YouTube does about an “unknown” that its own detection disagrees with — and whether the Deezer toggle, which costs AI uploaders their audience rather than their badge, turns out to be the version that bites.
