Streaming Platform Deezer Starts Flagging AI-Generated Music

Paris: French streaming service Deezer is now alerting users when they come across music identified as completely generated by artificial intelligence, the company told AFP on Friday in what it called a global first.

The announcement by chief executive Alexis Lanternier follows repeated statements from the platform that a torrent of AI-generated tracks is being uploaded daily -- a challenge Deezer shares with other streaming services including Swedish heavyweight Spotify.

Deezer said in January that it was receiving uploads of 10,000 AI tracks a day, doubling to over 20,000 in an April statement -- or around 18 percent of all music added to the platform.

The company "wants to make sure that royalties supposed to go to artists aren't being taken away" by tracks generated from a brief text prompt typed into a music generator like Suno or Udio, Lanternier said.

AI tracks are not being removed from Deezer's library, but instead are demonetised to avoid unfairly reducing human musicians' royalties.

Albums containing tracks suspected of being created in this way are now flagged with a notice reading "content generated by AI", a move Deezer says is a global first for a streaming service.

Lanternier said Deezer's home-grown detection tool was able to spot markers of AI provenance with 98 percent accuracy.

"An audio signal is an extremely complex bundle of information. When AI algorithms generate a new song, there are little sounds that only they make which give them away... that we're able to spot," 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 them in France, Deezer is a relative minnow compared to Spotify, which has 268 million.

The Swedish firm in January signed a deal supposed to better remunerate artists and other rights holders with the world's biggest label, Universal Music Group.

But Spotify has not taken the same path as Deezer of demonetising AI content.

It has pointed to the lack of a clear definition for completely AI-generated audio, as well as any legal framework setting it apart from human-created works.

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