This was a proposed review I wanted to post on the Facebook page of Smooth Jazz Global – the team behind Smoothjazz.com.
I like that this genre continues to live on even without mainstream radio support—which, in itself, is a dying breed. Sadly though, I just wish there was a checkbox I could use that limited the stream to human music, not AI.
That said, full disclosure: I love creating music with Suno. But I am not a musician, other than 5 1/2 years of piano as a child, 6 years as a band geek playing trombone, and DJ’ing for roller rinks from ’80-’86 and again from ’06-’22, where the music was mostly ’80s pop, R&B and early rap. But even with what I guess counts as a lot of listening experience, I don’t credit myself as a creative musician.
Sure, I can leverage one AI to build a music creation prompt and then give it to another AI and get a song. But I would never go to DistroKid and start putting those songs on streaming services alongside music created by actual musicians.
So, what brought all this to mind?
I sourced some audio gear from thrift and pawn shops to have a little Bluetooth setup for when I’m working in my garage, and I started streaming some of the available SmoothJazz.com chart playlists. Given my time creating AI music, I immediately recognized what I think is one of the biggest weaknesses of most AI-generated music: its inability to be relevantly unique compared to human music.
If you don’t believe me, just go to Suno, find one song, play it, and then take the option to start a radio station from it. After a while, it starts to feel like there is one house band for every genre and only a few voices that proliferate throughout the service.
And that brings me to what bothers me most about finding so much AI-generated music on the SmoothJazz.com charts.
One of the main things SmoothJazz.com promotes is helping independent artists get their music heard and exposed to a larger audience. That’s a worthy mission. But if part of the business model now includes promoting AI-generated songs into those same charts and playlists, there is a potential contradiction there. Every AI-generated track taking a place in a playlist or getting a stream is potentially taking that exposure—and potentially streaming revenue—away from one of the very human artists the service says it exists to support.
I don’t think AI music needs to disappear. That would be hypocritical coming from me because I have a great time making it. I just think there should be some distinction between using AI music as entertainment and putting it into the same commercial ecosystem where musicians are trying to make a living from something they actually played, sang, wrote and created.
Personally, I expect we’ll start seeing companies promoting themselves as “100% Human” before too long, or at least identifying certain parts of their business that way.
And when it comes to a Smooth Jazz chart or playlist, I’d happily check that box.
My Qobuz subscription is ending soon, and I decided to try the 30-day trial of TIDAL, which offers an AI preference for allowing or not allowing music that TIDAL detects as AI-generated. So, with the current SmoothJazz.com playlists available as of September 25, 2026, I loaded them while my TIDAL AI preference was set to not allow AI-labeled music.
Here are the stats from that experiment:
| SmoothJazz.com Playlist | Tracks | TIDAL-Labeled AI | % Labeled AI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sandy Shore’s Smooth Jazz Hit List | 53 | 8 | 15.1% |
| Streaming Top 100 | 103 | 0 | 0% |
| Airplay Top 100 | 105 | 1 | 1.0% |
| Smooth Jazz Radar | 53 | 6 | 11.3% |
| Listener Favorites | 53 | 6 | 11.3% |
| Smooth Lounge / Music2MoveU | 106 | 7 | 6.6% |
For me, the question then becomes, “Does SmoothJazz.com even know the content is AI-generated?”
And, not wanting to pick on SmoothJazz.com unfairly, I went looking for a comparison. I checked TIDAL’s own curated smooth jazz playlists and couldn’t find any tracks carrying TIDAL’s AI label. I then checked several user-created smooth jazz playlists containing roughly 50 to 80 songs and came up empty there too. I specifically checked the Milan Hotel Lounge playlist mentioned during my research and found no TIDAL AI labels there either.
This certainly isn’t a scientific survey of every smooth jazz playlist on TIDAL, and TIDAL’s AI detection isn’t necessarily going to catch everything. But that’s really not the point. I wasn’t trying to prove that nobody else has AI music in their playlists. I wanted to know whether finding 6 out of 53, 8 out of 53, or more than 11% to 15% of some SmoothJazz.com playlists labeled as AI was simply normal for the genre on TIDAL.
Based on the other playlists I checked, it doesn’t appear to be.
And that takes me back to what bothered me in the first place. SmoothJazz.com promotes itself in large part as a way to help artists get their music heard. If six or eight positions in a 53-song discovery playlist are occupied by recordings that TIDAL identifies as AI-generated, those are six or eight positions that aren’t exposing another human artist to that listener.
Maybe SmoothJazz.com knows those tracks are AI-generated and has decided they’re perfectly acceptable. Maybe they don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that, and I don’t want to accuse them of something I can’t establish.
But as a listener—and someone who actually enjoys creating music with Suno—I’d still like the checkbox option:
Human music only, please.