Briefly: The issue of AI-generated music on streaming platforms being “listened” to by AI is so unhealthy on Deezer, as much as seven out of each 10 streams of AI tracks are fraudulent, in accordance with the corporate. The follow is usually a profitable one: in 2024, a person was arrested over claims that he conned music providers out of $12 million utilizing this technique.
The French streaming large mentioned that AI-generated music accounts for simply 0.5% of streams on the platform. Nevertheless, its personal evaluation exhibits that 70% of these streams are fraudulent.
The arrival of generative AI and widespread use of the expertise has induced extra than simply copyright-infringement issues for the music business.
Fraudsters realized that they may use the AI instruments to rapidly generate tens of 1000’s of music tracks. They then use AI, typically together with actual people, to hear to those tracks, incomes royalties within the course of.
With so many tracks uploaded, it solely requires a small variety of fixed listeners per music for the cash to rapidly add up. This additionally helps keep away from detection measures that search for an unusually giant variety of listeners on unknown tracks.
Thibault Roucou, the director of royalties and reporting at Deezer, mentioned (by way of The Guardian) that the manipulation of AI-generated music was a bid to “get some cash from royalties.”
“So long as there may be cash [in fraudulent streaming] there will probably be efforts, sadly, to attempt to get a revenue from it,” he mentioned. “That is why we’re investing in combating it, as a result of we all know it is not going away and we have to be one step forward each time.”
Deezer says it makes use of a device that may detect 100% AI-created content material from AI music mills equivalent to Suno and Udio. Each these firms have been hit with separate copyright infringement lawsuits from music labels Common Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Group final yr for scraping copyrighted content material from the web with out compensation or credit score. Their protection was that they admitted to participating in these practices however claimed it fell beneath honest use.
Deezer mentioned that 18% of all every day uploads to its platform, round 20,000 tracks, have been AI-generated. The corporate added that it’s eradicating all totally AI-generated content material from its algorithmic suggestions.
Fraudulent streaming has at all times been an issue on music platforms, however AI has exacerbated the issue a thousandfold.
In line with authorities, between 2017 and 2024, 52-year-old Michael Smith of Cornelius, North Carolina, and his co-conspirators fraudulently inflated the variety of streams for his AI-generated tracks on platforms together with Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and YouTube.
Smith’s operation consisted of 52 cloud service accounts, every with 20 bot accounts, totaling 1,040 bots. It is estimated that every account may stream round 636 songs every day, accessing the platforms by way of VPNs, leading to 661,440 streams each day. At a royalty price of half a cent per stream, he labored out funds at $3,307 every day, $99,216 month-to-month, and greater than $1.2 million yearly.
