The panic says the machines are winning. The numbers say almost nobody is streaming what they make. The bigger question in South Africa is whose work those models were trained on.

More than half of the music uploaded to Deezer every day is now fully AI-generated. That is the platform’s own figure, roughly 90,000 machine-made tracks a day, more than two million a month. If you have spent time in a Spotify Discover playlist or deep in a TikTok feed lately, you have already met a few. Competent and convincing, catchy even, and made by no one in particular. No one played on them. A prompt and a dataset did the work.