France-headquartered music streaming service Deezer has launched a new AI detection tool – after filing two patent applications for the technology in December.
On Friday (January 24), the company revealed that its new tech has already discovered that roughly 10,000 ‘fully AI-generated tracks’ are being delivered to its platform every day.
That amounts to about 10% of the daily content delivered to Deezer.
Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier also said on Friday the company plans to “exclude” fully AI-generated tracks “from algorithmic and editorial recommendation.”
“Generative AI has the potential to positively impact music creation and consumption, but its use must be guided by responsibility and care in order to safeguard the rights and revenues of artists and songwriters,” Lanternier said.
The company says it set out last year to develop an AI detection tool that “surpass[ed] the ability of available tools.”
“Tools that are on the market today can be highly effective as long as they are trained on data sets from a specific generative AI model, but the detection rate drastically decreases as soon as the tool is subjected to a new model or new data,” explained Aurelien Herault, Chief Innovation Officer at Deezer
“We have addressed this challenge and created a tool that is significantly more robust and applicable to multiple models.”
“Generative AI has the potential to positively impact music creation and consumption, but its use must be guided by responsibility and care in order to safeguard the rights and revenues of artists and songwriters.”
Alexis Lanternier, Deezer
Deezer’s new tool, on which the company filed for two patents in December, “can detect artificially created music from a number of generative models such as Suno and Udio, with the possibility to add on detection capabilities for practically any other similar tool as long as there’s access to relevant data examples.”
Suno and Udio are among the most popular generative music AI tools on the market today.
The companies were sued last year by labels owned by the three majors, alleging that the AI companies trained their models on copyrighted music without authorization.
Last week, Suno was also sued by German collection society and licensing body GEMA.
Deezer has been among the most aggressive digital service providers (DSPs) when it comes to detecting AI-generated content, “noise” tracks meant to skim royalty revenue, and other low-quality content.
In 2023, the company launched an “artist-centric” payment model with Universal Music Group, designed to reward artists with large followings who are actively sought for by subscribers, and to disincentivize low-quality content. Other music companies, such as Warner Music Group and indie licensing organization Merlin, have since signed on to the model in France.
“There’s a lot of duplicated content, there’s a lot of content that is not even music… and at a certain point, you get way too much content that is useless for the users. And it starts creating a bad user experience,” then-CEO Jeronimo Folgueira said.
The growing presence of AI-generated music on streaming platforms has become a major concern for artists, labels, and publishers.
A report released late last year by CISAC, the global umbrella group for authors’ societies, estimated that AI could “cannibalize” up to 24% of music creators’ revenues by 2028.
It estimated a cumulative loss of EUR €22 billion (USD $23.1 billion) in revenue for music and audiovisual creators over five years (2023 through 2028), compared to what would have been earned had AI not existed. And that’s just the loss for creators; the report didn’t estimate the losses to record labels and publishers.
“We want decision-makers to understand the urgent need to protect human creators and to protect the interests of society and culture and creativity,” said CISAC Director General Gadi Oron.
Oron said that not a single AI developer had signed a licensing agreement with any of the 225 collective management organizations (CMOs), performance rights organizations (PROs), or other collection societies that are members of CISAC worldwide.
“Our societies are approaching hundreds of AI companies with a request to negotiate a license [recognizing] that they are using works that belong to the creators,” Oron said.
