Morgan Stanley: Most Gen Zers and millennials in the US listen to about three hours of AI music a week
That’s enough AI music to last the run time of “Avatar.”
Video may have killed the radio star, but AI is starting to dance on its grave.
Morgan Stanley’s annual survey of audio habits revealed that younger Americans are listening to an amount of AI-generated music each week that’s roughly on par with the run time of “Avatar.”
“This is the first year we included any AI music questions in our survey,” wrote a team led by analyst Benjamin Swinburne. “What we found surprised us, with 50-60% of listeners 18- 44 reporting 2.5-3 hours per week of AI music listening.”
The most common sources from which AI music is being ingested are YouTube and TikTok, per Morgan Stanley’s survey. Even so, their analysts remain bullish on Spotify and Warner Music Group, writing:
“As a distribution platform with leading global scale, a history of product innovation, and leveraging machine learning, we see AI as a tailwind to Spotify in 2026 and beyond. Specifically, we expect AI to prove foundational to Spotify’s ‘personalization 2.0’ efforts. For OW WMG, we expect the rise of AI music to increase the value of scarce catalog assets while potentially creating new competition for front line content. However, we see WMG’s recently announced Suno partnership as an important step toward AI music monetization. We believe the multiple compression absorbed by WMG shares in 2025 suggests a lot of AI risk is already priced in.”
