Only 5% of Canadians like AI-generated music, and 65% dislike it, Signal Hill's 2026 survey finds

Only 5% of Canadians say they like fully AI-generated music. 65% say they dislike it.

Those numbers come from Audio on the Move 2026, a survey of 6,161 Canadians aged 12 and up that Toronto’s Signal Hill Insights published on October 7, 2026. The other 29% are neutral.

AI podcasts land even lower: 4% like them and 68% dislike them.

Matt Hird, Vice-President of Research at Signal Hill Insights, put it in one ratio: “The number who dislike AI-generated audio outnumber those who like it by a factor of at least 13 to 1.”

Signal Hill is an audio research firm, and the exact wording of its AI question matters.

What Signal Hill’s Audio on the Move 2026 asked 6,161 Canadians about AI music

Signal Hill put one question to a nationally representative panel, medium by medium: “How do you feel about the use of AI to create content for each of the following media?” The fieldwork ran in May and June, according to Broadcast Dialogue.

Teens are less negative, but only just. In Signal Hill’s own write-up, 13% of Canadians aged 12 to 17 say they like AI music and 8% like AI podcasts. Half of them still dislike both.

Canada started out skeptical anyway. The Ipsos AI Monitor 2026 ranks it last of 32 countries for excitement about AI products and services, at 26%, and joint-first with Australia for nervousness, at 67%.

AI music is in a Canadian court right now as well. On September 2, SOCAN sued Suno in Canada’s Federal Court over 150 streamed outputs.

So is this a Canadian thing, or do listeners everywhere feel the same way?

Do people like AI music? What the Signal Hill, Deezer-Ipsos and Nordic surveys show

Short answer: very few people say they like fully AI-generated music. And when they just hear it, almost nobody can tell it’s AI.

Here’s how the latest numbers line up:

• Signal Hill, Canada, 2026: 5% of Canadians like fully AI-generated music and 65% dislike it.
• Deezer and Ipsos, 8 countries including Canada, 2025: 97% of 9,000 people couldn’t pick out the fully AI-generated songs in a blind test of 3 tracks, and 80% want fully AI-generated music clearly labeled, per Deezer’s results.
• Nordic Digital Music Survey 2026: 77% want AI music labeled, 54% would prefer a streaming tier with only human-made music, and only 31% think they can tell the difference.
• Qobuz, September 2026: tracks its detector identifies as AI-generated get 0.38% of all its streams.

Curiosity is real, though. In the Deezer-Ipsos survey, 66% of music streaming users said they’d listen to a fully AI-generated track at least once out of curiosity. 40% said they’d skip one without listening.

So my read is that people are reacting to the idea of fully AI-generated music, because almost none of them can hear it.

That gap is where artists have to decide what to disclose.

Does Signal Hill’s Audio on the Move 2026 survey count AI-assisted music?

No. Signal Hill’s question came with a note: “this refers to content that has been fully created with AI, rather than just edited or touched-up.”

So the 65% is about tracks generated start to finish, like a song made entirely in Suno. Using AI for stems, mastering or effects wasn’t part of the question, so this survey has no number for it.

Creators draw the same line. In the Uppbeat Creator Report 2026, only 6.7% of 1,792 creators said fully AI-generated content is acceptable, while close to 60% were comfortable using AI assistance.

If you’re deciding how to disclose AI use, that split is the useful part. Fully AI-generated tracks are the ones 65% of Canadians dislike, and platforms label them anyway: Deezer’s AI music detector tags them, Qobuz added an AI tag on September 24, 2026, and Apple Music will show Made With AI labels based on what labels and distributors declare.

So when you disclose, say what the AI actually did. “AI-assisted mastering” and “fully AI-generated” describe 2 different songs, and so far Canadians have only told Signal Hill how they feel about the second one.