LONDON – Music streaming platform Deezer announced on Friday that it will start marking albums containing AI-generated songs as part of its effort to combat fraud.
Based in Paris, Deezer is addressing a noticeable increase in music that has been produced using artificial intelligence, which is believed to be done with the intention of wrongfully collecting royalties.
The app will incorporate on-screen warnings indicating “AI-generated Content,” alerting users that some tracks within the album were created using a Song Generator.
The company commented that AI-generated music presents a “problem across the industry.” “We are dedicated to safeguarding the rights of artists and songwriters, especially as copyright regulations come under scrutiny regarding AI model training,” said CEO Alexis Lantanier.
Deezer’s initiative underscores the confusion that arises from AI generators trained on various internet materials, such as text, images, and audio. AI companies are facing significant legal challenges over the practice of gathering web content for training without compensation.
According to an AI song detection tool released by Deezer this year, approximately 18% of songs — or around 20,000 tracks — uploaded to the platform daily are entirely AI-generated. Just three months prior, this figure was 10%, noted Lantanier in a recent discussion.
Though AI has various advantages, it “raises numerous questions,” Lantanier shared with the Associated Press. Utilizing AI to create music can be acceptable, but issues emerge when a machine, or even a bot, can independently create music.
The scammers “generate a flood of songs. They upload them, attempting to get onto playlists and recommendations, which helps them accrue royalties,” he explained.
Artists are not able to directly upload music to Deezer or its competitors like Spotify or Apple Music. Rather, music labels and digital distribution services handle this for contracted artists, while others can opt for “self-service” distribution platforms.
Although AI-generated tracks make up only about 0.5% of Deezer’s overall streams, the company has deemed it “obvious” that these songs are primarily intended for deceptive purposes.
Deezer announced that AI tracks involved in “stream manipulation” will be prevented from receiving any royalty payments.
AI continues to be a contentious subject within the music industry, prompting significant discussions around its creative potential and legal concerns.
Two leading AI song generators, Snow and Woodio, have been sued by record labels for copyright violations and are facing claims that they improperly used the works of iconic artists such as Chuck Berry and Mariah Carey.
The German royalty collection agency Gema filed a similar lawsuit against Snow in Munich, criticizing the services for producing songs that are “confusingly similar” to original works, referencing pieces like Alphaville’s “Forever Young” and Bonnie Vega’s “Mambo Number 5.”
Recent reports indicated that major record labels are in discussions with Snow and Woodio regarding compensation.
To identify AI-generated songs, Lantanier revealed that Deezer employs the same generator that creates the songs to analyze the output.
“The song creates such a complex signal, which allows for pattern recognition. There’s an abundance of details within the song,” stated Lantanier.
It seems that AI music generators struggle to create songs without identifiable yet subtle patterns.
“So we need to update our tools continuously,” Lantanier mentioned. “We keep generating songs to help our algorithms learn and adapt. It’s essentially a battle of AI against AI.”
Fraudsters have the potential to earn significant money via streaming. Lantanier referred to a case last year, marking the first instance of criminal charges related to artificially inflated music streaming, where individuals were accused of orchestrating a wire fraud scheme involving hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs streamed billions of times using bots, netting around $10 million.
