- French streaming service Deezer will now alert users if they encounter music that it has identified as being entirely created by artificial intelligence, the company told AFP on Friday.
PARIS: French streaming service Deezer will now alert users if they encounter music that is identified as being entirely created by artificial intelligence, the company told AFP on Friday, in what it said was a world first.
CEO Alexis Lanternier's announcement follows repeated claims by the platform that a flood of AI-generated tracks are being uploaded daily – a problem that Deezer and other streaming services, including Swedish heavyweight Spotify, are facing.
In January, Deezer said it was receiving 10,000 AI-powered track downloads per day, and in an April statement, that figure doubled to more than 20,000, representing about 18 percent of all music added to the platform.
The company “wants to make sure that royalties that should go to the artists are not taken away” for tracks created using a short text query entered into a music generator like Suno or Udio, Lanternier said.
AI-generated tracks are not removed from Deezer's library, but instead demonetized to avoid unfairly reducing the royalties of human musicians.
Albums containing tracks allegedly created in this way are now labeled with a notice saying “AI-generated content,” in what Deezer says is a world-first for a streaming service.
Lanternier said Deezer's detection tool can identify AI origin markers with 98 percent accuracy.
“An audio signal is an incredibly complex set of information. When AI algorithms generate a new song, there are little sounds that only they make that give them away… that we can notice,” he said.
“It's not audible to the human ear, but it's visible in the audio signal.”
With 9.7 million subscribers worldwide, most of whom live in France, Deezer is a relatively small company compared to Spotify, which has 268 million subscribers.
In January, the Swedish firm signed a deal with the world's largest label, Universal Music Group, that is expected to provide higher compensation to artists and other rights holders.
However, Spotify has not followed Deezer's lead in demonetizing AI-powered content.
It points out that there is no clear definition of audio created entirely by AI, nor any legal basis separating it from human-created works.
