By Kelvin Chan
LONDON (AP) – Music streaming service Deezer said Friday it will begin flagging albums with songs generated by AI, part of its fight against fraudsters.
Paris-based Deather is tackling a surge in music on a platform created using artificial intelligence tools that say it’s being done to fraudulently acquire royalties.
The app will display on-screen label warnings about “AI-generated Content” and notify listeners that some tracks in the album have been created with the Song Generator.
Deezer is a small player in music streaming, dominated by Spotify, Amazon and Apple, but the company says that AI-generated music is a “industry-wide problem.” “We are committed to protecting the rights of artists and songwriters at a time when copyright laws are being questioned in favor of AI model training,” CEO Alexis Lantanier said.
Deezer’s movement highlights the confusion caused by the generator AI systems trained with internet content, including text, images, audio, and more available online. AI companies face many lawsuits and are challenging the practice of cutting off the web without paying such training data.
According to the AI song detection tool Deezer unveiled this year, 18% of songs on a daily or roughly 20,000 tracks were uploaded to the platform, completely AI-generated. Just three months ago, that number was 10%, Lantanier said in a recent interview.
While AI has many benefits, for the music industry, it “creates a lot of questions,” Lantagnier told The Associated Press. It’s fine to use AI to make music, but as long as there’s an artist behind it, the problem arises when someone, or even a bot, can make music using it, he said.
The music scammers “create a lot of songs. They upload and try to get on playlists and recommendations, and as a result, they gather royalties,” he said.
Musicians cannot upload music directly to Deezer or rival platforms such as Spotify or Apple Music. Music labels and digital distribution platforms can do that for artists with contracts, but anyone else can use a “self-service” distribution company.
The fully generated music accounts for only about 0.5% of Deather’s total stream. However, the company said it was “clear” that scams were the “primary purpose” of these songs.
Deezer said that the AI songs used in “stream manipulation” will be blocked from royalty payments.
AI is a hot topic in the music industry, and there is a stir of debate about its creative possibilities and concerns about its legality.
Two of the most popular AI song generators, Suno and Udio, have been sued by record companies for copyright infringement and face allegations of misusing the works of artists from Chuck Berry to Mariah Carey.
German royalty collection group Gemma sued Sno in a similar case filed in Munich, denounced the services that produce songs “confusingly similar” to the artist’s original versions, such as Alphaville’s “Forever Young”, “Daddy Coeur”, and Bonnie Vega’s “Mambo Number 5.”
News reports earlier this month reported that the main record labels are negotiating with Suno and Udio for compensation.
To detect tagging songs, Lantanier says Deezer uses the same generator used to create songs to analyze the output.
“The song creates such a complex signal, so you identify patterns. There’s a lot of information in the song,” says Lanternier.
It appears that AI music generators can’t create songs without subtle but recognizable patterns.
“So we need to update our tools every day,” Lantagnier said. “So we continue to generate songs to learn and teach algorithms. So we’re fighting AI and AI.”
Scammers can make a lot of money through streaming. Lantagnier pointed to a criminal case in the United States last year. Officials said artificially inflated music streaming was the first time they were involved. Prosecutors charged men with wire fraud conspiracy, generating hundreds of thousands of AI songs, automatically streaming billions of times using bots, and earning at least $10 million.
Original issue: June 20, 2025, 7:35pm EDT
