Music streaming service Deezer adds AI song tags in fight against fraud
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.
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.
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.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
31 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Safi Bugel's experimental album of the month
After establishing herself as a techno DJ in some of the wonkiest corners of underground dance music, Gwenan Spearing has spent the last few years settling into slower, more abstract territory. Alongside her club sets, she co-organises an ambient deep listening series in Berlin and spends her spare time experimenting with modular synthesis. Phase Space is the latest expression of this interest, a project rooted in generative electronics and real-time responses. Degrees of Freedom is Spearing's first outing under this new alias: an EP of meandering ambient tracks that blur the lines between electronic and acoustic as instruments are sampled, warped and overdubbed through her synthesiser. On the subaquatic opening track Sync, cowbells are stretched and delayed beyond recognition against a pulsing analogue rhythm. Towards the end of Some Pluck, a dense shimmer almost sounds like steel pans, but you get the impression it's something more elusive. Her improvisatory approach is the core of this album. Time signatures are varied and sounds are layered randomly by control circuits while Spearing tinkers along. What could just be friendly easy listening material is tipped off-kilter by these strange elements – and is all the better for it. Generator I, as uncanny as it is beautiful – much in the way that Mica Levi's film scores are – is where this approach shines most. The deep, woozy melody is enough to induce a dream-like state, but instead keys tumble around it. On Sleep Pressure, a self-styled 'lullaby for grownups', the soporific sequence is unsettled by the faint clatter of metal, which has the same soft dissonance of wind chimes, delicate but jarring. Even closer Generator II, the record's most straight-up atmospheric composition, is flecked with subtle fuzzy glitches. It's a lovely, drifting listen with just the right amount of curiosity and texture to keep you locked in. Pool Jams is the latest record by the Berlin duo INIT, made up of Nadia D'Alò and Benedikt Frey (R.i.O). As the name suggests, there's a summer sensibility here, but only in the most feverish sense: think smoky vocals, sluggish grooves and clouds of synths – hypnotic music for hot, late nights. On Openness Trio, guitarist and producer Nate Mercereau, saxophonist Josh Johnson and percussionist Carlos Niño join forces to create a collection of compositions that are as expansive and beguiling as the California hills and canyons they were recorded in (Blue Note). Another great collaborative effort comes from Brazilian sound artists Anelena Toku and Carla Boregas (Other People). Marking a decade of their multidisciplinary project of the same name, Fronte Violeta is both soothing and ghostly. Across the 10 tracks, soft, droning electronics are interlaced with whining vocals and samples of found natural objects including branches and feathers.
Times
2 hours ago
- Times
Robots are taking grad jobs. Do we give up or use our brains?
W hat do you get when you cross an overeducated population with an absence of high-quality jobs? This is, perhaps, the setup to history's least funny joke. But the punchline is important, perhaps world-changingly so. We are about to find out what it is. This year the number of graduate jobs advertised by employers has gone down 33 per cent. AI is to blame, naturally. Robots are doing the grunt work that previously fell to capitalism's least pitied whipping boys: recent history graduates who dream of accountancy qualifications and an annual holiday in Santorini. As a result we can expect to see a bunch of smart, overeducated youngsters wandering about with nothing to do. In a way, this is an acceleration of something that was already happening. According to the most recent figures from the Office for National Statistics I can find, in 2017, 31 per cent of graduates were in jobs for which they were overeducated. We will now look back on them as the lucky ones. AI is about to make the problem so much worse.
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Money issues? The financial psychotherapist will see you now
I am surprised that Vicky Reynal, a financial psychotherapist, is soft and reaffirming when I meet her. Perhaps I shouldn't be – she is a therapist, after all. But something about her line of work, helping people untangle their issues with money, had primed me to expect someone more brisk, more clinical. I think of how many business executives she meets with, how prohibitively expensive her time must be, and how strong her boundaries probably are. I even panic at the thought of logging into our Zoom meeting one minute late, because time, after all, is money. Reynal, I'm sure, would find this compelling. She believes that we often have thoughts and feelings about money that actually have nothing to do with cold, hard cash, and everything to do with our earliest emotional experiences, deepest yearnings or misgivings. It can be frustrating, then, that Reynal won't talk much about herself. I'm genuinely curious – especially when I ask about her fascination with Warren Buffett, whom she has read extensively about and once met in person. She admits she was drawn to him growing up, but offers only vague hints as to why: references to formative financial experiences and the symbolic weight he held within her family, though she declines to elaborate. As a psychotherapist, she tries to obscure her own life from her clients, to prevent it obstructing their process. Anonymity, it turns out, is a very good therapeutic tool. 'People try to guess where I'm from, and their guesses tell me so much about their internal world. Some people who have very strict and ungiving parents guess that maybe I'm eastern European, because of how cold they perceive me to be. Others guess I am Mediterranean or South American – from a warm country – because of how loving and giving [they think] I am.' When Reynal was younger and went through therapy herself, she had a transformative experience working through some of the feelings about money. This, she thought, must be an area ripe for psychotherapeutic practice. But after nearly a decade studying psychology and psychotherapy, she was surprised to find that only a handful of research papers and textbooks directly focus on it. 'I thought, 'Wait a minute, we are talking about our relationship with food, with sex, with people, why aren't we talking about people's relationship with money?' It comes in the therapy room anyway, because it's part of leading a life and people get into all sorts of messes because of it – and as therapists we have the lens to understand that.' When Reynal began to explicitly market herself as a financial psychotherapist, she was suddenly overwhelmed by patients queueing up to talk to her. Her inbox was full of emails from would-be clients, telling her how relieved they were to find her. 'They were saying: 'I didn't know a money psychotherapist existed, and I need your help,'' she says. She sees some clients on a concession fee or a reduced rate, as they may be unemployed or struggling with debt. But others don't need it. These are patients who know what they need to do when it comes to money on a rational level, but they just can't bring themselves to do it: the client who obsessively buys shoes, or the one that can't bring himself to buy basic things like a coat in the winter, because he feels a deep and bewildering desire to deny himself nice things – despite having more than ample means to buy them. Others have more than enough cash, but can't find contentment. They come to her thinking: 'Maybe you won't judge me, for being wealthy and yet unhappy.' Finances are central to how we relate to the world. The way we deal with our income affects our families, shapes our conversations with partners, and can cast long shadows over our relationship to our parents. But as with so much in therapy, when people think they are coming to talk about money, it is actually not about the money at all. And beneath all that, it often reflects the lessons we absorbed growing up. 'It's just a language that we use, because I think it's easier to say: 'You are being stingy,' than to say: 'I wish you were more affectionate with me,' or 'I don't feel you love me enough,' or 'I love you more than you love me,'' says Reynal. She also meets clients who are struggling to make ends meet, who have the sense that they are being childish and impulsive with money – they feel belittled by the way that they spend. When Reynal raises this, I can't help but wonder whether her clients attach those negative descriptions to themselves because in the US and the UK, poverty is often described as being about bad choices rather than broader economic conditions. Most of us can point to relationships in our lives – certainly with ourselves – where the way in which we spend serves as a proxy for something deeper. The colleague who is a constant under-tipper, who feels hard done by despite always contributing least to the bill; the sibling who works like a dog but can never, ever ask for a raise; the friend who constantly feels on the edge of financial ruin, despite having more than enough. So what are the subconscious motivators beneath these interactions? Reynal will often see clients who come in to talk to her about one thing: for example, a recurring frustration that they are always too generous and give far beyond their means, even to the point that it leaves them feeling resentful and angry; which in turn leads to a conversation about people pleasing and where the urge to put others' needs first came from in their life. Those behaviours, it turns out – just like infidelity or drug use, or any of the more obvious topics that we associate with therapy – may originate from a time in our lives when we felt unsatisfied. An incredibly generous person might have struggled to fit in during their teenage years, while another's hunger for wealth might be due to an unmet need to be loved by their caregiver as a baby or feeling constantly rejected or dismissed as a child. 'They are non-obvious links on the surface … but they help us get to the real longing underneath, the real unmet desire.' Her practice has helped her understand broader shifts, too. She remains shocked at how social media use has led to an unprecedented level of lifestyle inflation. People are no longer comparing their lives with their neighbours, but to totally unattainable lifestyles displayed by people paid to look rich. 'There's this manic level of social comparison,' she says. 'People begin to believe that everyone has more money than they do. A lot of clients of mine are men who come under an enormous amount of pressure because they have taken on mortgages bigger than they could afford or cars that they couldn't afford. They have to accept that they have failed against their own standards, or the shame of not being able to provide what their family wanted or was hoping for.' In some ways, it's no surprise that many of her clients feel a sense of relief after finding her. These kinds of struggles aren't often met with much sympathy – especially in an economy where so many are simply trying to make ends meet. 'There's this idea that is quite common that money will fix everything. And of course, if you are struggling to pay your bills, money would make that better. But to make the leap that if people have money they must be happy, or they have no right to be unhappy – that's a big leap,' she says. She lists many of the ways that people struggle with wealth. Some clients have more than their families did, and self-sabotage as a result, perhaps believing they don't deserve it. They don't invoice clients properly for work, or feel guilty when there's a lot of money in their account. Others spend money extravagantly, almost to rid themselves of it. And in the therapy room she often learns about how the stories clients have heard growing up affect them: if their families thought of wealth as immoral or greedy, for example, what does that say about them if they become wealthy? But Reynal also stresses the many stabilizing and positive relationships people have with money – like feeling empowered after years of struggle, or wanting to be financially independent because it is freeing. 'It's not about stripping emotions out of financial decisions,' she says. 'It's about becoming aware of them.' In that sense, she invites readers to be inquisitive about their own attitudes towards money, how they spend it, and where their own beliefs about financial security come from. 'We can't all afford therapy. But opening up that curiosity can be enough: why am I buying this thing? Or why am I feeling guilty about spending money on that thing, if I have enough for it? What's the longing behind that?' she says. Some may think there are just a number of different ways to split the bill. But for those who look deeper, they may just find out something new about themselves.
