Music streaming service Deezer adds AI song tags in fight against fraud
[June 20, 2025]
By KELVIN CHAN
LONDON (AP) — Music streaming service Deezer said Friday that it will
start flagging albums with AI-generated songs, part of its fight against
streaming fraudsters.
Deezer, based in Paris, is grappling with a surge in music on its
platform created using artificial intelligence tools it says are being
wielded to earn royalties fraudulently.
The app will display an on-screen label warning about “AI-generated
content" and notify listeners that some tracks on an album were created
with song generators.
Deezer is a small player in music streaming, which is dominated by
Spotify, Amazon and Apple, but the company said AI-generated music is an
“industry-wide issue.” It's committed to “safeguarding the rights of
artists and songwriters at a time where copyright law is being put into
question in favor of training AI models," CEO Alexis Lanternier said in
a press release.
Deezer's move underscores the disruption caused by generative AI
systems, which are trained on the contents of the internet including
text, images and audio available online. AI companies are facing a slew
of lawsuits challenging their practice of scraping the web for such
training data without paying for it.
According to an AI song detection tool that Deezer rolled out this year,
18% of songs uploaded to its platform each day, or about 20,000 tracks,
are now completely AI generated. Just three months earlier, that number
was 10%, Lanternier said in a recent interview.
AI has many benefits but it also "creates a lot of questions" for the
music industry, Lanternier told The Associated Press. Using AI to make
music is fine as long as there's an artist behind it but the problem
arises when anyone, or even a bot, can use it to make music, he said.
Music fraudsters “create tons of songs. They upload, they try to get on
playlists or recommendations, and as a result they gather royalties,” he
said.
Musicians can't upload music directly to Deezer or rival platforms like
Spotify or Apple Music. Music labels or digital distribution platforms
can do it for artists they have contracts with, while anyone else can
use a “self service” distribution company.
Fully AI-generated music still accounts for only about 0.5% of total
streams on Deezer. But the company said it's “evident" that fraud is
“the primary purpose" for these songs because it suspects that as many
as seven in 10 listens of an AI song are done by streaming "farms" or
bots, instead of humans.
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 Any AI songs used for “stream
manipulation” will be cut off from royalty payments, Deezer said.
AI has been a hot topic in the music industry, with debates swirling
around its creative possibilities as well as concerns about its
legality.
Two of the most popular AI song generators, Suno and Udio, are being
sued by record companies for copyright infringement, and face
allegations they exploited recorded works of artists from Chuck
Berry to Mariah Carey.
Gema, a German royalty-collection group, is suing Suno in a similar
case filed in Munich, accusing the service of generating songs that
are “confusingly similar” to original versions by artists it
represents, including “Forever Young” by Alphaville, “Daddy Cool” by
Boney M and Lou Bega's “Mambo No. 5.”
Major record labels are reportedly negotiating with Suno and Udio
for compensation, according to news reports earlier this month.
To detect songs for tagging, Lanternier says Deezer uses the same
generators used to create songs to analyze their output.
“We identify patterns because the song creates such a complex
signal. There is lots of information in the song,” Lanternier said.
The AI music generators seem to be unable to produce songs without
subtle but recognizable patterns, which change constantly.
“So you have to update your tool every day," Lanternier said. "So we
keep generating songs to learn, to teach our algorithm. So we’re
fighting AI with AI.”
Fraudsters can earn big money through streaming. Lanternier pointed
to a criminal case last year in the U.S., which authorities said was
the first ever involving artificially inflated music streaming.
Prosecutors charged a man with wire fraud conspiracy, accusing him
of generating hundreds of thousands of AI songs and using bots to
automatically stream them billions of times, earning at least $10
million.
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