Deezer says 44% of new music uploads are AI-generated, most streams are fraudulent
Music streaming services like Spotify and YouTube Music have become the primary way people listen to music, which can be a lot more convenient than buying individual albums. However, this also makes it easier for AI-created tracks to worm their way into your playlists. Most streamers don’t go out of their way to label AI music, but Deezer has worked to develop technology to identify that content. In a recent update, the company says AI music is approaching half of all new uploads, and most of the supposed listeners of those streams are AI themselves.
AI-generated music has taken off in the last few years, but it doesn’t get as much attention as other parts of the AI ecosystem. That’s due, in part, to the fact that AI music can fly under the radar. With the right context and prompting, an AI track can sound like generic, over-produced music created by humans. According to Deezer, its users have a hard time differentiating AI tunes from the real deal. Listeners taking a Deezer survey listened to three songs, two of which were AI. A whopping 97 percent were unable to tell the difference between the AI songs and the one made by a human, the company reports.
Deezer says it has developed technology to detect AI uploads, and it’s one of the few streamers to explicitly label such content. As generative audio models have proliferated, the rate of AI uploads to Deezer has reached a staggering 44 percent—that’s 75,000 new AI tracks on Deezer every single day. Deezer licenses this technology to third parties, which it claims has a false positive rate of less than 0.01 percent.
