Some alarming stats have been published in a new survey about young people’s listening habits. Over half of 18–44 year olds spend between two and a half to three hours a week listening to AI music.
The survey was conducted by Morgan Stanley, which publishes an annual report on Americans’ listening habits. For the first time in 2025, they asked a question about AI music and it seems that the kids largely don’t seem to care about the ethical issues surrounding it.
The stats show that 60% of 18- to 29-year-olds listen to AI music for on average three hours a week. That figure drops to 55% and two and a half hours per week for 30- to 44-year-olds and 25% and 1.1 hours for 44- to 64-year-olds.
Of course, those figures only measure where respondents have consciously listened to AI music. As we know, much of the so-called ‘slop’ out there on YouTube and Spotify is unlabelled as such.
As for the platforms where listeners are finding most of this? YouTube and TikTok are the guilty parties it seems, according to Morgan Stanley. But then, given that they are subscription-free, perhaps that is not surprising.
In recent months, Spotify has launched a clampdown on AI-generated music and Deezer has announced that whilst 34% of new tracks uploaded to the platform are purely AI, it accounts for just 0.5% of its streams, suggesting that there are ways and means to combat it.
But the message from the Morgan Stanley survey is that even if subscription platforms do manage to get on top of the problem of low-quality AI bilge, increasingly, people don’t care.
