alt Hacker NewsDeezer says 44% of songs uploaded to its platform daily are AI-generated
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> 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company
This is the nut. This isn't actual AI generated music. It isn't intended to be real music that people listen and enjoy. It's just filler to populate tracks that pay out to scammers, so that scammers can direct bots and hijacked accounts to play their tracks and steal a share of the platform revenue.
With the majority of popular music decided by a handful of people in LA, Nashville, or New York, let me ask one question: is this actually a bad thing?
Hear me out. Most of what's on the radio could have been made by AI already and no one would've noticed the difference.
To be clear, I'm not talking about legitimate artists doing something original or authentic. I'm talking about the execs who find performers to sing and dance over their perfectly manufactured hit single. Songs made by people like Max Martin, who aren't trying to express anything beyond their knowledge of which combination of notes has the highest ROI. No disrespect to Max, he's incredibly talented at what he does. But now the execs have the data, and they don't need the Max Martins, Diane Warrens, or Carole Kings anymore. They can plug in the numbers and out comes a perfect song for their next artist.
So let's embrace the new AI pop. Let it dethrone the kings who've shaped the sound of pop culture for too long.
Real art always seems to find its fans eventually, and I don't think AI will stop that. Yet. When a model writes a song that lingers the way "Linger" does, maybe it will. But at that point, if the music really is that good, does it matter?
I've been working hard at this over at SubmitHub, developing a way to detect AI songs: https://www.submithub.com/ai-song-checker
These days roughly 20% of the songs coming through our platform for promotion are AI-generated. Roughly 75% of them are honest and declare their AI usage - but another 25% try to hide it. Some of them are actually writing scripts to "clean" their audio so that it can bypass detection.
Not sure what algorithm Deezer is using, but Benn Jordan is a fairly tech savvy musician who talks about ways to id AI generated music by looking for compression artifacts used by the training data.
Most of the videos uploaded to YouTube are worthless.
AI simplifies the creation, doesn't mean it's good and will be listened to. And if it will, then what's the problem?
You can talk about ethics, IP, etc. but we're not even there yet.
These days YouTube has so much AI generated music, very hard to differentiate from originals. For examples look at these YT channels uploading AI generated music:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6Xw8Jrwf009nHTV165UuQw
https://www.youtube.com/@ForeverDisco80s/videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQn7ZUixKXg&list=RDMQn7ZUixK...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUph_6i5Pr0&list=RDWUph_6i5P...
so on..I think uncountable amount of AI gen stuff is uploaded to YT everyday
So we'll be going back to publishers as curators. Good for the publishers, I guess.
Does that really matter? Eventually it will be 99%, but even then I am not necessarily concerned until it crowds out human created songs.
Before AI, 99% of anything was trash and now with AI, perhaps 99.9% is. But the thing that matters is whether the remaining 1% or 0.1% is good or meaningful for us or not. Though I guess soon enough even AI music will be meaningful for us, but I don't think this precludes the existence of human musicians.
To quote Fugazi, "It don't matter what they're sellin, it's what you're buying."
Who cares if people are mass uploading AI content? I care what the listen rates are.
> The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company.
> Today’s announcement comes as Deezer conducted a survey last November that found that 97% of participants couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and human-made music.
Unable to tell it wasn't made by a human, but they can tell it's not very good apparently.
It's damn time for streaming platforms to allow users to filter out AI music. Better than that, would be for the EU to regulate this and to demand an opt-out by default for every streaming provider.
Something's missing completely from both this article and I don't see it mentioned anywhere in the comments:
Deezer will tag it and refuse to promote it once it's tagged as such. You're not gonna stumble upon it by leaving the autoplay on and it will not appear on any of its editorial playlists. Quite frankly this problem would be completely gone if every streaming service implemented this same policy.
Deezer also does some other things right: they boost the artist payout if the listener intentionally searches for an artist/song/album instead of stumbles upon it via autoplay/playlists, they introduced lossless audio a decade before Spotify, and you don't even need an API key to interact with its metadata (of course you need to oblige by their rate limits).
Some criticism so that this doesn't look like a pure promotion: their apps are absolute crap in comparison to Spotify and Apple Music, and even in comparison with TIDAL, which itself isn't really a pinnacle of user experience. It's definitely the most frustrating one out of the bunch that I have direct experience with.
A video by Le Monde (french newspaper) showing that you can have an ai song ready and distributed to several platforms in less than one hour : https://youtu.be/G3d8wBOLS2c?is=meGcHQZtpcRFRUsj
(The original video is in french but it has an autodubbed english track)
Tangent:
I assume this “AI-generated” music is created the same way an LLM generates text: use samples from a corpus strung together into a new [derivative] output.
But it seems plausible that algorithmic generation can be used at any stage of the process. How much disclosure do we (listeners) require? At what point is it unacceptable “AI-generated” music?
The answers are going to be subjective. And human. And dealing with this, I think, is going to take a direction like the “typewriters in college” headline from a few days ago - human involvement, low automation … things that don’t scale.
From the press release, it's not all that clear what Deezer is doing about it. 44% of uploads getting less than 1% of non-fraudulent streams seems like a pretty strong reason to outright ban AI generated submissions.
For the non-fraudulent listens, I'm very curious how many of these are part of auto-generated playlists. Are people just being served this music as part of a feed, or are they actually seeking it out? I'd be very surprised if it was the latter.
I wonder if this will lead to a sort of "open sourcing" of music, where the reputation of what one produces will be improved by releasing the raw DAW files/tracks/etc. Even if AI is used to generate the constituent parts of a manually-assembled track, it would still demonstrate to listeners that there was significant human involvement in the process.
Touring, merch, etc will also serve as good "proof of give-a-shit".
How much of this is driven by passive income "entrepreneurs" trying to get their AI-generated tracks placed on playlists to gather streaming revenue? Normally an artist might release 10-15 tracks per year tops, but with AI you can easily churn out hundreds of tracks explicitly targeting trending playlists and (in theory) make a few thousand a month in royalties.
Youtube got hit by massive downfall in quality by this as well. It's absurd.
Similar stats for podcasts - https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-stats/#growth
This shit is so dark. I mean, popular music has always been pretty formulaic, and prone to imitation and trite bullshit, but at least when humans were making it, you'd occasionally get some spark of genius, real originality, even in the most mundane forms.
I use LLMs for code every day, but if I could flip a switch to turn it all off and prevent this shit from happening to the arts, I probably would.
Given how little skill/effort is required for AI-generating music (compared to making it "from scratch"), I find it surprising that they're getting more human-created music than AI generated music. I would have expected something like 10x-100x more AI submissions than human ones.
Do any of these AI music generators produce output that can be iterated upon like the output of coding agents?
Anyone else is this the first you've heard of "Deezer"?
however you might feel about AI generated media, flooding platforms with unlabeled slop is nothing but scammer behavior and we should take serious measures to disincentivize it for both the uploaders and service providers.
I do suspect we are in for a lot of verified-human platforms where your fee goes to supporting establishing an artist or author's humanity beyond a reasonable doubt.
Is there a way to listen to say the top ten AI songs?
I wonder how much of this even matters. Sounds like it doesn't (aside from taking up space on Deezer's drives).
> The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company.
Even pre-AI, music has always been a winners-take-most business. Per an article from 2022, the vast majority of artists have fewer than 50 monthly listeners[0], which I suspect is far lower now due to the flood of AI.
Not sure about Deezer, but for Spotify there is some kind of minimum to get you into any algorithmic rotation. People try to game this with bots, i.e. botted streams, but the problem with bots is that the accounts are bots, so the recommendations just become music for other bots, hence the part where 85% of the streams are botted. So it doesn't actually work, and you have to rely on old-fashioned promotion to get into any algorithmic playlists.
So 44% of uploads being AI-generated sounds bad, but it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever encounter them naturally, the same way that people don't naturally discover random, non-AI artists with 10 monthly listeners and tracks with less than 1000 plays. This isn't a defense of AI music slop, by the way; it's more pointing out that the "making a song" part only takes you about 20% of the way to becoming an artist people want to listen to. A harsh lesson our friends in /r/SunoAI are learning.
[0] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/over-75-of-artists-on...
I really don't care if it's AI, I love music and it's 100% subjective to what I like, I'm not less moral if I prefer some ones and zeroes than a real band if it pleases my ears. I created a lot of songs in Suno which I really really like and have been in my playlist for months alongside the bands I have listened for more than 30 years.
Deez what?
Do any of the major streaming platforms have a stance against AI generated music?
Does Deezer charge per song?
Sounds like a free backup service to me.
> In addition to detecting, tagging and removing AI-generated music from recommendations, Deezer has now stopped storing hi-res versions of AI-tracks
Important point for anyone out there thinking about generating a lot of samples. Expect to get increasingly filtered out if you don't emphasize quality or uniqueness or something. It's cheaper to detect that something is generated, and apply standard base rate reasoning 'it's probably slop' and filter it out, than to try to do expensive evaluation to look for the rare gems.
If your goal is to create something you enjoy, do not labor over the process of how you do that, try everything, be a kid again, simply lose yourself in the joy of that thing, even if it contains "using ai" it's not a bad thing, it's merely another tool, like your DAW or photoshop.
Also, lastly, have fun, be frustrated, get angry, be excited, be mad.
Making music is fun, you don't have to make the process harder.
If you want to make money, good luck.
This is good and cool.
Grifters' gonna grift. The streaming indy pop world is toast.
On the other hand, this does seem to be rekindling, at least somewhat, an interest in people going to see small shows of real people making music. Which was historically what music was about for the vast majority of our human history. Mass market pop as a viable business was a particularly 20th century anomaly.
And oddly, in people buying real vinyl by real people.
I've had to change my video and music consumption habits, because I fall asleep fairly often with either music or videos playing in the background (bad habit, I know). I'm always sure to switch to a playlist running locally when I get tired, because I'll be damned if someone's slop is going to get monetized while I sleep and the algorithm starts sneaking that crap in.
Great job guys! Almost halfway there! Keep working hard and we can make it to 100%!
Remember: AI use is mandatory and non-negotiable. Hopefully the Trump administration will be rolling out AI-use metrics for the whole population, so we can track progress against our goals.
They call it UGC, user-generated content. I’ve been calling it UGB for a long time, the B standing for Bullshit.
The funny thing about AI is counterintuitive. It will put an even higher value on quality as quantity is now essentially worthless. I don’t believe AI can generate high quality on its own. It needs to be used and manipulated to generate higher quality outputs than a human or AI alone can.
How do they tell? Because they're awful? Some of them might be good. And many, if not most, songs created by unknown artists are terrible.
... And most streams are fraudulent.
I'm not sure I'd care if AI generated music was competing against my own organic music, but having the stream-reward diluted down by bots is actually hurting artists.
I remain happy with my decision to leave streaming behind and curate my own listening around artists I know, recommendations from people I trust and a complete absence of any and all of this worthless slop.
"97% of participants couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and human-made music."
Of course, it takes 2 seconds to shit out an ai song. I'm surprised it isn't way higher
What a coincidence. Just today, someone on my high school alumni group just posted an album they "made", which is 100% AI generated music. They claim authorship because they created the prompts to the AI.
My feeling is that if the AI is this good, the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman.
This is incentivized by how streaming compensates artists. If these folks can also bot a bunch of "listens" to this slop they get paid out of everyone's monthly subscription payment. I want a streaming service where my money only goes to the artists I listen to - not to Taylor Swift and Suno artist #3141592.
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I'm trying to learn music production with a DAW, sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting my time. Part of my reason for trying this was reading how creative endeavors can be therapeutic (I'm dealing with burnout/depression/cptsd).
I'm at the stage where sometimes I make something that sounds good (to me) but I know it requires work (in the "not fun" sense) to finish it and even then, it will likely never be appreciated by anyone but myself.
Which isn't a problem if the process itself is joyful, but I have to admit I've always struggled to enjoy anything that doesn't involve other people in some way (shared goal or approval of some form).
None of these problems are "new", but I feel like AI is making this question of "why do it" or "what is worth doing" even more urgent. Kind of wondering how others are affected by all this, if at all.