The streaming service Deezer has launched a free tool that scans playlists on 20 popular platforms and reveals which songs are made by artificial intelligence. The tool works in 27 languages and covers Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, YouTube Music and others - with simple logic: you pick a service, grant access to a playlist, and get a list of how much of your music was actually written by an algorithm.

The figures behind the decision explain why someone needed a tool like this. According to Deezer, a full 44 percent of the songs uploaded to the platform daily are AI-generated - that's close to 75,000 new artificial tracks a day, over two million a month. The flood is real, even if it isn't loud yet.

Here comes the more interesting part. Even though so much gets uploaded, artificial music makes up only 1 to 3 percent of total listening. And of that listening, around 85 percent is flagged as fraudulent - bots playing tracks on a loop to squeeze money out of the system, not real listeners. This isn't art that found an audience, but a machine stealing from another machine.

"By detecting and tagging AI music over the past year and a half, Deezer has been at the forefront of transparency in streaming," says CEO Alexis Lanternier. A sentence that sounds like marketing, but behind it there's a real difference in approach: while Spotify and Apple Music merely put a label on such tracks, Deezer pulls them out of recommendations and out of editorial playlists.

The company is offering its technology to competitors too, and is considering stricter rules towards the suppliers of such music. The question left hanging over the whole industry is simpler than it looks: when nearly half of new music is written by a machine, what are we even listening to when we put on headphones - and who's earning from it?