Apple Music Says AI-Generated Music Accounts for ‘Significantly Less Than 1%’ of Total Listening

Photo Credit: Mariia Shalabaieva Apple Music shares an open letter with the industry to reaffirm its commitment to “keep music fair” and navigate the use of AI in the music business. On Wednesday, Apple Music shared an open letter with the music industry entitled “What We’re Doing to Keep Music Fair,” which outlines the streamer’s commitment to navigating the use of artificial intelligence across the music business. The company said it believes that any new technology should amplify artists rather than replace them. Apple shared that AI music represents “significantly less than 1%” of all plays on the service. While the company does believe that AI is an “exciting opportunity” to help artists find new ways to tell stories, it stresses that it is putting in guardrails to ensure transparency and prevent abuse. Apple Music became the first global streaming service to add tagging support for AI content back in March. The company says top distributors have already begun supplying this information, and all providers will be required to do so in the future. Currently, this AI metadata is not shown to users in the Music app interface, but it enables Apple to stay abreast of the situation. Apple has also developed tools internally that help identify AI-generated content as part of its ongoing battle against fraud, spam, and artist impersonation. The platform automatically removes an AI song from the service when a majority of plays are coming from stream manipulation. To that end, Apple Music also doubled the penalty for “extreme” cases of stream manipulation in February, and its Music Style Guide expressly forbids the use of AI in a misleading manner. Apple asserts that it is an industry leader when it comes to preventing stream manipulation, excluding around 2 billion manipulated streams in 2025 and redistributing those royalties to its payout pool. The company says stream manipulation on the platform is less than 0.5%—one of the lowest rates in the industry. Human curation remains at the center of Apple Music’s platform, the company reiterates, and its editorial team remains focused on featuring “the best music,” enhancing recommendations and discovery. AI has aided in that goal in several ways already, including features like AutoMix, and more recently, the Playlist Playground, which helps users create personalized playlists on the fly using a natural language prompt.