French DSP Deezer has been open about the rates of fraudulent activity on its service, in its efforts to crack down on fraud. Now it’s revealed that as much as 70% of the AI-generated music that’s streamed on Deezer may be fraudulent activity. While AI-generated tracks make up only 0.5% of total streams on the platform, Deezer’s analysis suggests that the majority of those streams are fake. So how big is this problem? Well, big enough to be concerning but perhaps not quite as worrying as it sounds. Spotify’s head of artist and industry partnerships, Bryan Johnson, recently said that there is “infinitely small consumption of fully AI-generated tracks on Spotify.”
So while seeing fraudulent activity shift to AI-generated music is an issue that is taking money from real artists’ pockets, it’s also perhaps an inevitable part of fraud’s raision d’être: it simply endlessly takes the path-of-least-resistance to making as much money as possible by nefarious means.
