Deezer: Not Impressed with AI Tunes

July 14, 2025

Apparently, musical AI models have been flooding streaming services with their tracks. But ai music is the tune for the 21^st century is it not? The main problem: these bots can divert payments that should have gone to human artists. Now, we learn from MSN, “Streaming Platform Deezer Starts Flagging AI-Generated Music.” The article, originally published at The Economic Times, states:

“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% 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.”

Probably a good thing. Will other, larger streaming services follow suit? Spotify, for one, is not yet ready to make that pledge. The streaming giant seems squeamish to wade into legal issues around the difference between AI- and human-created works. It also points to the lack of a “clear definition” for entirely AI-generated audio.

How does Deezer separate the human-made tunes from AI mimicry? We learn:

“Lanternier said Deezer’s home-grown detection tool was able to spot markers of AI provenance with 98% 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.’"

Will bots find a way to eliminate such tell-tale artifacts? Will legislation ever catch up to reality? Will Big Streaming feel pressure to implement their own measures? This will be an interesting process to follow.

Cynthia Murrell, July 14, 2025

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Financial, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.