Back in 2023, Deezer announced that it would tag AI-generated songs on the platform. Now, the DSP has rolled this feature out to users – making it, Deezer says, the first streaming platform to clearly flag which “albums include fully AI generated tracks”. That’s interesting in itself – we’ll now find out if users’ behaviour differentiates when given a choice between AI-generated and human music. But there’s some more useful data that Deezer has observed which gives us an insight into the scale of the impact of AI-generated music in the real world.
First of all: there’s a lot of AI music being made and uploaded to Deezer. Via the platform’s AI-music detection tool, the DSP has found that 18% of all music uploaded on a daily basis – that’s more than 20,000 tracks – are 100% AI generated. “We’ve detected a significant uptick in delivery of AI generated music only in the past few months and we see no sign of it slowing down,” said Alexis Lanternier, CEO, Deezer.
That’s… a lot of AI music – 100,000 songs so far this week – on Deezer. However any twinges of panic you may feel as a musician, songwriter or even concerned music fan might be put into context with some other data released this week: up to 70% of the AI-generated music that’s streamed on Deezer may be fraudulent activity – but AI-generated tracks make up only 0.5% of total streams on the platform. Our rough maths concludes that only 0.35% of all Deezer streams are fraudulent ones of AI-generated music. That feels fairly insignificant, despite the volume of tracks.
Is AI-generated music taking listening time away from human artists? Those numbers haven’t been released yet, but Deezer is currently excluding fully-AI generated tracks from algorithmic and editorial recommendations, “in order to minimise any negative impact on artist remuneration and the user experience.”
This approach to transparency around AI music may be a move to align the DSP with an issue that resonates well with users: “We are also clear in our commitment to safeguarding the rights of artists and songwriters at a time where copyright law is being put into question in favour of training AI models,” Lanternier said.
