Deather announced Friday that it will begin labeling albums that include AI-generated tracks as part of its efforts to combat streaming scams.
The company reports about 18% of the music uploaded daily (more than 20,000 tracks are now fully generated). While most of these tracks don't go viral, Deather says that around 70% of the streams are fake and are designed to fraudulently earn royalties.
To combat this, Deezer's AI-generated tracks were clearly tagged. These tracks do not appear in edit playlists or algorithm-based recommendations, and fraudulent streams are excluded from royalty payments.
The company says the new label will be a game changer that will help listeners determine the difference between human-created music and AI content.
Image credit: Deezer
Deezer points out that for now, Ai-Only Songs accounts for just 0.5% of all streams on the platform, but that trend is growing rapidly.
“We have only detected a significant rise in the distribution of AI-generated music in the past few months, but we have no indication that it will be slower. It's an industry-wide issue and we are working to lead the way music fans can increase transparency by identifying which albums contain AI music.
“While AI is not inherently good or bad, we believe that a responsible, transparent approach is key to building trust with users and the music industry,” he continued. “It's also clear in its commitment to protecting artists and songwriters' rights when copyright laws are being questioned in favor of training AI models.”
Deezer filed for two patents in December 2024 for its AI detection technology. It says it focuses on two different ways of detecting “unique signatures” used to convey the difference between synthetic and authentic content.
The move is reportedly being held by Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment to give talks to AI startups Udio and Suno to license their work. Startups are being sued by record companies for copyright infringement, and any deals will help resolve lawsuits between them, Bloomberg reported earlier this month.