In brief: The problem of AI-generated music on streaming platforms being "listened" to by AI is so bad on Deezer, up to seven out of every 10 streams of AI tracks are fraudulent, according to the company. The practice can be a lucrative one: in 2024, a man was arrested over claims that he conned music services out of $12 million using this method.
The French streaming giant said that AI-generated music accounts for just 0.5% of streams on the platform. However, its own analysis shows that 70% of those streams are fraudulent.
The advent of generative AI and widespread use of the technology has caused more than just copyright-infringement problems for the music industry.
Fraudsters realized that they could use the AI tools to quickly generate tens of thousands of music tracks. They then use AI, sometimes in combination with real humans, to listen to these tracks, earning royalties in the process.
With so many tracks uploaded, it only requires a small number of constant listeners per song for the money to quickly add up. This also helps avoid detection measures that look for an unusually large number of listeners on unknown tracks.
Thibault Roucou, the director of royalties and reporting at Deezer, said (via The Guardian) that the manipulation of AI-generated music was a bid to "get some money from royalties."
"As long as there is money [in fraudulent streaming] there will be efforts, unfortunately, to try to get a profit from it," he said. "That's why we're investing in fighting it, because we know it's not going away and we need to be one step ahead every time."
Deezer says it uses a tool that can detect 100% AI-created content from AI music generators such as Suno and Udio. Both these companies were hit with separate copyright infringement lawsuits from music labels Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Group last year for scraping copyrighted content from the internet without compensation or credit. Their defense was that they admitted to engaging in these practices but claimed it fell under fair use.
Deezer said that 18% of all daily uploads to its platform, around 20,000 tracks, were AI-generated. The company added that it is removing all fully AI-generated content from its algorithmic recommendations.
Fraudulent streaming has always been a problem on music platforms, but AI has exacerbated the problem a thousandfold.
According to authorities, between 2017 and 2024, 52-year-old Michael Smith of Cornelius, North Carolina, and his co-conspirators fraudulently inflated the number of streams for his AI-generated tracks on platforms including Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and YouTube.
Smith's operation consisted of 52 cloud service accounts, each with 20 bot accounts, totaling 1,040 bots. It's estimated that each account could stream around 636 songs daily, accessing the platforms via VPNs, resulting in 661,440 streams every day. At a royalty rate of half a cent per stream, he worked out payments at $3,307 daily, $99,216 monthly, and more than $1.2 million annually.
