AI generating one in ten songs on Deezer

Music streaming site Deezer said Friday that one in ten tracks uploaded to the streaming service each day is either fake or just noise created by artificial intelligence programmes.

The company's fraud detection technologies, rolled out in 2023, discovered that "around 10,000 tracks completely generated by AI are uploaded to the platform every day, representing around 10 percent of the total", the Paris-based firm said in a statement.

The success of its technologies, which can identify AI content "without the need for extensive training on specific databases", had led it to seek last month two patents.


Deezer says it aims to better pay genuine musicians by weeding out fake songs that are then streamed by fraudulent accounts created in order to remunerate the "artists".

Many fake tracks can clone the voices of existing artists, which currently cannot be copyrighted, or copycat popular songs.

Deezer is now focussing on a system to label AI-generated content that would be excluded from its recommended listening lists.

"Artificial intelligence is continuing to disrupt the music ecosystem more and more," chief executive Alexis Lanternier said in the statement.

Deezer said in January that it would tweak its remuneration model in an effort to better pay artists whose songs get fewer downloads but have a more diverse base of listeners.