15 ms·

Deezer says 44% of songs uploaded to its platform daily are AI-generated

367 points by FiddlerClamp 5mo ago

captainkrtek 5mo ago
Do any of the major streaming platforms have a stance against AI generated music?
- devindotcom 5mo ago
  bandcamp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605490
- saaaaaam 5mo ago
  No, not really. Spotify is trialling a voluntary “AI Credits” thing where people can highlight use of AI when they release music. https://support.spotify.com/lc/artists/article/ai-credits/ https://support.spotify.com/lc/artists/article/ai-credits/ The problem is that subjective judgements by streaming platforms on where an AI line is drawn in music production is difficult. If you human-write a song but use AI to produce a synth stem or bass stem and then mix it down and use AI mastering is that better or worse than if you use AI to help you write something but record with human musicians and a bit of AI assist? And what if you use AI entirely to write and compose but use human performers to record? And what if the AI is trained only on licensed content?
  - add-sub-mul-div 5mo ago
    There's a whole spectrum from sfw to nsfw but we don't give up and allow porn on every platform because drawing the line is "difficult". We can use common sense and taste, with all their flaws.
    - TremendousJudge 5mo ago
      I wouldn't say that porn is not allowed on every platform. basically every mainstream "content posting" platform (fb, ig, tw, tiktok, etc) allows softcore porn, and in fact pushes it on users, both on content an on advertising. if the same was true with AI music I wouldn't bother with the platform
  - chromacity 5mo ago
    Honestly, debating these corner cases feels like a distraction tactic. The reality is that the bulk of that 44% is total AI slop: one-sentence prompts entered into Suno to generate 1,000 tracks and extract money from subscribers who stream in the background. It's the same thing with writing. No one cares that you asked a chatbot to help you reword a paragraph in your essay. The problem is zero-effort slop delivered by the truckload to your social media feed.
    - ctoth 5mo ago
      If... If you're pulling from something called a feed ... Are you really surprised to get slop in it?
      - Kye 5mo ago
        You're thinking of a feed trough, like for pigs. This use of feed comes from news services.
    - harrall 5mo ago
      It’s not a corner case when you have to enforce it. Someone will end up in the middle and then you’ll be responsible for accepting or rejecting it. The bulk is obvious but the debate isn’t for the obvious.
      - chromacity 5mo ago
        But it doesn't. We have a problem. We can focus on addressing the problem without pre-adjudicating every hypothetical corner case. If your "work" is mostly AI, and if you don't disclose it, it goes to /dev/null. And yeah, you can get into a debate that it's unfair to reject 51% but allow 49%, but that's how the real world works - otherwise, nothing would ever get done. You also get a DUI for BAC of 0.08% but not 0.07%. That's not an argument for putting DUI laws on hold until we can figure out a more perfect approach.
        saaaaaam 5mo ago
  - gwern 5mo ago
    > The problem is that subjective judgements by streaming platforms on where an AI line is drawn in music production is difficult. This may be more of an economic problem. There is a stark difference between a music track with 1% human work/effort, and 0%. You can make many musical tracks if you have to do only 1% of the work, but you can't make >100x what you made without AI (Amdahl's law). While the latter can scale infinitely; you could upload a billion tracks if you wished, you're limited basically by bandwidth and automation. So a classifier or policy which permitted the 99% AI but banned the 100% AI may be adequate.
devindotcom 5mo ago
however you might feel about AI generated media, flooding platforms with unlabeled slop is nothing but scammer behavior and we should take serious measures to disincentivize it for both the uploaders and service providers. I do suspect we are in for a lot of verified-human platforms where your fee goes to supporting establishing an artist or author's humanity beyond a reasonable doubt.
- ambicapter 5mo ago
  Is it free to upload these files? Maybe a 1¢ fee would be enough to kill a majority of the spam.
  - saaaaaam 5mo ago
    Effectively yes. There are plenty of music distributors that have “no fee” distribution where they simply take a percentage of any royalties. I suspect we are going to see that model quickly go out of favour though.
    - TremendousJudge 5mo ago
      really? there are ways of putting music on Spotify that don't involve paying a fee upfront at any time?
      - mjr00 5mo ago
        Yes, last I checked at least LANDR, Amuse and Tunecore all had plans where you release for free and they take a % of royalties.
      - saaaaaam 5mo ago
        Yes, lots.
- hombre_fatal 5mo ago
  What does human verification look like when you grant that it’s impossible to tell?
MORPHOICES 5mo ago
[dead]
milesvp 5mo ago
Not sure what algorithm Deezer is using, but Benn Jordan is a fairly tech savvy musician who talks about ways to id AI generated music by looking for compression artifacts used by the training data. https://youtu.be/QVXfcIb3OKo?si=74EdIey6RIhuwdzg https://youtu.be/QVXfcIb3OKo?si=74EdIey6RIhuwdzg
- saaaaaam 5mo ago
  This is apparently how Deezer is doing it.
- 8note 5mo ago
  it will still miss the ai authoring the music, and a human performing it
  - moron4hire 5mo ago
    It will also miss music performed by a stack of cartoon raccoons in a trench coat and music performed by God, so I don't get what point there is in mentioning other fictional characters.
  - redsocksfan45 5mo ago
    [dead]
nottorp 5mo ago
So we'll be going back to publishers as curators. Good for the publishers, I guess.
- r_lee 5mo ago
  this seems like a pattern seen across industries when it comes to AI even more consolidation and lock in
- subscribed 5mo ago
  As an user I wouldn't mind as long as it's attributed and I can skip it. Pisses me off on YouTube - it's really hard to find something genuine in the sea of the AI written, AI subbed, AI generated and AI published - it's a scourge not because it's there, but because the channels are lying about it AND because 99.99999% of what I encountered it's not worth the waste heat processing a "publish 100 catchy videos about current affairs".
- starkeeper 5mo ago
  On a similar note I recently deleted a whole bunch of automated tests because if the AI is going to write most of the code then I should test it to make sure it's good! This won't work for all projects, but for my indie games it's a good idea.
  - rectang 5mo ago
    > I recently deleted a whole bunch of automated tests because if the AI is going to write most of the code then I should test it to make sure it's good! ?? You say you deleted the tests, because you "should test it"? The logic seems inconsistent. Sanity checking LLM-generated code with LLM-generated automated tests is low-cost and high-yield because LLMs are really good at writing tests.
    - otabdeveloper4 5mo ago
      > ...because LLMs are really good at writing tests. No, they're absolutely shit at writing tests. Writing tests is mostly about risk and threat analysis, which LLMs can't do. (This is why LLMs write "tests" that check if inputs are equal to outputs or flip `==` to `!=`, etc.)
jasongrishkoff 5mo ago
I've been working hard at this over at SubmitHub, developing a way to detect AI songs: https://www.submithub.com/ai-song-checker https://www.submithub.com/ai-song-checker These days roughly 20% of the songs coming through our platform for promotion are AI-generated. Roughly 75% of them are honest and declare their AI usage - but another 25% try to hide it. Some of them are actually writing scripts to "clean" their audio so that it can bypass detection.
- cleversomething 5mo ago
  This is an aside, but thank you for doing this work! As a musician who plays real instruments and submits real songs to Submithub, it's nice to know that hard work is going into validation and prevention of scammers passing off AI as their own talent. Keep fighting the good fight.
  - CharlesW 5mo ago
    "AI detectors" are fun like horoscopes are fun, until they flag your music as AI generated, and distribution channels blacklist you and your label sues you. On the bright side, you can sue the creator of the AI detector in return.
    - input_sh 5mo ago
      The only reason you're saying that is because you haven't tried to build such a detector yourself. It's not like text where it's impossible to tell reliably if something's AI generated or not, from a technical perspective it's very trivial to detect anything coming straight out of a Suno/Udio prompt. Nobody open sourced their detection algorithm as that would just trigger a cat-and-mouse game between Suno/Udio and a detection platform (and Suno/Udio have way more VC money than you do), but plenty are being sold as a service and work very reliably.
      - CharlesW 5mo ago
        > …from a technical perspective it's very trivial to detect anything coming straight out of a Suno/Udio prompt. It's trivial to vibe-code something that detects watermarked output and accidental model fingerprints. But next week the watermarks will be defeated, and the accidental fingerprints will change and ultimately disappear. It's not possible to generally solve the "To what degree is this audio AI generated?" problem, any more than it has been to solve the same problem for text and images. https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/teach/ai-detectors-dont-work/ https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/teach/ai-detectors-dont-wo...
marsven_422 5mo ago
[dead]
mjr00 5mo ago
I wonder how much of this even matters. Sounds like it doesn't (aside from taking up space on Deezer's drives). > The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company. Even pre-AI, music has always been a winners-take-most business. Per an article from 2022, the vast majority of artists have fewer than 50 monthly listeners[0], which I suspect is far lower now due to the flood of AI. Not sure about Deezer, but for Spotify there is some kind of minimum to get you into any algorithmic rotation. People try to game this with bots, i.e. botted streams, but the problem with bots is that the accounts are bots, so the recommendations just become music for other bots, hence the part where 85% of the streams are botted. So it doesn't actually work, and you have to rely on old-fashioned promotion to get into any algorithmic playlists. So 44% of uploads being AI-generated sounds bad, but it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever encounter them naturally, the same way that people don't naturally discover random, non-AI artists with 10 monthly listeners and tracks with less than 1000 plays. This isn't a defense of AI music slop, by the way; it's more pointing out that the "making a song" part only takes you about 20% of the way to becoming an artist people want to listen to. A harsh lesson our friends in /r/SunoAI are learning. [0] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/over-75-of-artists-on-spotify-have-fewer-than-50-monthly-listeners/ https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/over-75-of-artists-on...
- rectang 5mo ago
  44% of uploads are probably not created by 44% of "artists". The core of people who are looking to exploit the system are going to be good at gaming the recommendation algorithm — they're specialists in it solely for the money who don't need to trouble themselves with artistic concerns.
  - mjr00 5mo ago
    I'm not saying it's impossible, but at a minimum it's extremely hard to game the recommendation algorithm (primarily talking about Spotify, maybe Deezer's is less sophisticated). The best way to "game" the recommendation algorithm, to kickstart a new/less-established artist profile, is to get onto popular playlists. However these playlists either have actual quality barriers (so they won't put AI slop music on) or they take $$ (so this doesn't really work with the "mass generated AI slop" approach).
wenbin 5mo ago
Similar stats for podcasts - https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-stats/#growth https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-stats/#growth
cdrnsf 5mo ago
I remain happy with my decision to leave streaming behind and curate my own listening around artists I know, recommendations from people I trust and a complete absence of any and all of this worthless slop.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
jagged-chisel 5mo ago
Tangent: I assume this “AI-generated” music is created the same way an LLM generates text: use samples from a corpus strung together into a new [derivative] output. But it seems plausible that algorithmic generation can be used at any stage of the process. How much disclosure do we (listeners) require? At what point is it unacceptable “AI-generated” music? The answers are going to be subjective. And human. And dealing with this, I think, is going to take a direction like the “typewriters in college” headline from a few days ago - human involvement, low automation … things that don’t scale.
- Kye 5mo ago
  My understanding is music generation is more like stable diffusion. It generates a waveform as an image, then turns it into an audio file.
  - cubefox 5mo ago
    They do use diffusion models, but I don't think they would make a detour via images. They can just generate audio directly with audio diffusion rather than image diffusion.
    - corysama 5mo ago
      There technically was one experiment early on to trick Stable Diffusion into generating spectrograms that could be converted into audio. And, it worked surprisingly well. https://web.archive.org/web/20230314190913/https://www.riffusion.com/about https://web.archive.org/web/20230314190913/https://www.riffu... https://huggingface.co/riffusion/riffusion-model-v1 https://huggingface.co/riffusion/riffusion-model-v1 But, I'd expect everything in the past 3 years to diffuse the audio waveform directly.
      - Kye 5mo ago
        That's probably what I was thinking of. I haven't kept up as much on non-text generative AI.
- 5mo ago
palmotea 5mo ago
Great job guys! Almost halfway there! Keep working hard and we can make it to 100%! Remember: AI use is mandatory and non-negotiable. Hopefully the Trump administration will be rolling out AI-use metrics for the whole population, so we can track progress against our goals.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
Keyframe 5mo ago
Youtube got hit by massive downfall in quality by this as well. It's absurd.
ymolodtsov 5mo ago
Most of the videos uploaded to YouTube are worthless. AI simplifies the creation, doesn't mean it's good and will be listened to. And if it will, then what's the problem? You can talk about ethics, IP, etc. but we're not even there yet.
- Forgeties79 5mo ago
  That is theoretically how one would think it would play out but that’s not what happens in reality. Instead it becomes like blog spam where it becomes impossible to actually find what you’re looking for because you’re wading through so much crap you don’t want. Also, a lot of us value the fact that music is made by a person. Digital tools have been around for a long time and people have bickered about that, but ultimately they still require a person with some knowledge to sit down and actually produce the music, to do the thing. Writing prompts until you get something interesting can be fine, but what people are doing is carpet bombing us with whatever nonsense comes out because they have a financial incentive to do so. I have plenty of experiments back when I did more digital music where I would mess with frequency modulators and such until I just found something interesting. I don’t see the harm in activities like that. But that’s not really what’s happening here. It’s deliberately lazy, corner cutting work to spam music platforms for profit. Yes there is a gray area between these two scenarios but that gray area isn’t the problem.
  - tombert 5mo ago
    Honestly I think the thing that most humans appreciate is effort. Using AI tools is not inherently "bad", but these very-literally mass produced AI songs are almost by definition low-effort and as a result pretty bland and unlikeable. Digital music has always been fine to me, as long as the song being produced feels like it took a human some amount of effort.
    - gedy 5mo ago
      Yeah I agree with that nuance, as I personally enjoy making AI covers of songs I like in genres that I can't produce myself (old vintage blues covers of 80s new wave songs if you must know). It's a fair amount of work prompting and curating (and editing in some cases). I think they are cool and have shared a few, but they do tend to get lumped in with "ai slop" and some people take offense.
anticorporate 5mo ago
I've had to change my video and music consumption habits, because I fall asleep fairly often with either music or videos playing in the background (bad habit, I know). I'm always sure to switch to a playlist running locally when I get tired, because I'll be damned if someone's slop is going to get monetized while I sleep and the algorithm starts sneaking that crap in.
strangegecko 5mo ago
I'm trying to learn music production with a DAW, sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting my time. Part of my reason for trying this was reading how creative endeavors can be therapeutic (I'm dealing with burnout/depression/cptsd). I'm at the stage where sometimes I make something that sounds good (to me) but I know it requires work (in the "not fun" sense) to finish it and even then, it will likely never be appreciated by anyone but myself. Which isn't a problem if the process itself is joyful, but I have to admit I've always struggled to enjoy anything that doesn't involve other people in some way (shared goal or approval of some form). None of these problems are "new", but I feel like AI is making this question of "why do it" or "what is worth doing" even more urgent. Kind of wondering how others are affected by all this, if at all.
- pojzon 5mo ago
  AI makes or will make everyone question doing „any” creative work. The real question you should ask yourself is „Do I care?” If you do it for yourself - do it. If you learn that to make money - forget about it.
- taneq 5mo ago
  The not-fun work isn’t on the song, it’s on you. Improving the song is a byproduct. This only really becomes apparent over time but you’ll realise you were working on yourself all along.
- izzydata 5mo ago
  I am hopeful that in the near future once AI has saturated as much of everything that it can that it will actually become even more worth it to do things. At least for me the only reason to experience art in any form is that there was human intent behind it. Thus making human generated content more valuable compared to the flood of empty AI content.
- lacunary 5mo ago
  I'm having fun building elaborate software that meets my needs precisely and nobody else's. I mean, maybe it would meet other's needs but that production would take away from the fun and learning I have building it, and would also reduce its utility for me personally.
SwellJoe 5mo ago
This shit is so dark. I mean, popular music has always been pretty formulaic, and prone to imitation and trite bullshit, but at least when humans were making it, you'd occasionally get some spark of genius, real originality, even in the most mundane forms. I use LLMs for code every day, but if I could flip a switch to turn it all off and prevent this shit from happening to the arts, I probably would.
- mikojan 5mo ago
  "Probably"? I'd hit that a thousand times just to be sure. Don't understand how one can experience anything but infinite dread when confronted with the effects of these models on the arts. Maybe I am getting old. But I don't think so...
  - pesus 5mo ago
    If I had to guess, I'd say that it's actually more of a young person thing to want to get rid of all AI. I've only ever seen older people wearing a shirt with an AI generated image on it. I would absolutely push that button a thousand times as well.
  - SwellJoe 5mo ago
    I mean, there are some positive uses for the technology, some will likely save lives and advance the frontier in medicine and science. The ways it's able to automate research tasks is a pretty big deal. And, even though I know that, I think with the harm it's doing to our humanity with all this slop overwhelming everything (the web is now more slop than human, YouTube and every music streaming app soon will be), it's maybe not worth it. I don't know how to balance those two things. And, I don't know how you'd regulate it to make it safe, even if we had politicians anywhere who wanted to.
- TheMagicHorsey 5mo ago
  Butlerian Jihad vibes are building.
- Bud 5mo ago
  [dead]
arc_light 5mo ago
[dead]
dukeofdoom 5mo ago
I can see this being useful for solo game devs
- wao0uuno 5mo ago
  Ah yes, vibe coded games with AI slop soundtrack. The future of gaming couldn't look any brighter.
  - dukeofdoom 5mo ago
    That might be true, but if you watch some of the youtube videos from solo game devs where they spend 5 years making a game, and come out with 28k in sales. Anything that brings a game concept to market faster I think is a win for everyone.
    - wao0uuno 5mo ago
      Not really. We don't need more games. We need better quality games made with passion. More than a thousand new games are added to Steam every week. It's all just noise.
- pesus 5mo ago
  Maybe useful for ensuring their reputation gets tarnished.
- bandrami 5mo ago
  If the music isn't important enough to write it's not important enough to put in the game in the first place. Solo game devs can use csound.
ashleyn 5mo ago
I wonder if this will lead to a sort of "open sourcing" of music, where the reputation of what one produces will be improved by releasing the raw DAW files/tracks/etc. Even if AI is used to generate the constituent parts of a manually-assembled track, it would still demonstrate to listeners that there was significant human involvement in the process. Touring, merch, etc will also serve as good "proof of give-a-shit".
- UtopiaPunk 5mo ago
  That would be neat, but I really don't see it happening. In software-land, it's my sense that, if anything, AI is working against open source. AI is creating busy work for open source maintainers with a large volume of low quality PRs, and scrapers are burdening those who maintain their own small-scale, public facing infrastructure. Meanwhile, AI is ingesting their publicly available data to improve itself, with the implicit (if not explicit) goal of making those projects irrelevant (why read the docs, participate in a forum or chat, or submit a PR when you can ask your AI thing to just write the code you want instead?). Furthermore, if a software developer is of the opinion that AI is "bad" in some way and they want to resist it, I think it would make the most sense to keep their code private. Open source is feeding AI.
TheMagicHorsey 5mo ago
What a coincidence. Just today, someone on my high school alumni group just posted an album they "made", which is 100% AI generated music. They claim authorship because they created the prompts to the AI. My feeling is that if the AI is this good, the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman.
- jjfoooo4 5mo ago
  > My feeling is that if the AI is this good, the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman. I call this the instant imitator trap. If anything AI generates stands out from the slop, the slop generators will just imitate it, thus quickly making whatever standout quality from the "original" work also slop. I wrote about it here: https://tombedor.dev/creativity/ https://tombedor.dev/creativity/
- redwall_hp 5mo ago
  Good news: the courts (all the way up to the Supreme Court, which declined the appeal) have upheld the Copyright Office's assertion that their album is public domain and ineligible for copyright protection. Prompts are insufficient human authorship, which is a requirement for copyright to apply. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-declines-hear-dispute-over-copyrights-ai-generated-material-2026-03-02/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-de... Arguably, this makes sending such an album to a distributor a contractual violation as well, since you must assert that you own the rights to license it to them and are empowering them to collect royalties on your behalf.
- userbinator 5mo ago
  the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman It seems like "personalised recommendations" are heading in that direction, but don't forget there's also the social aspect --- listeners will want to share what they liked the most, so even if they end up automatically prompting the AI to generate exactly the music they want, they'll find others who also like very similar music.
AlexandrB 5mo ago
This is incentivized by how streaming compensates artists. If these folks can also bot a bunch of "listens" to this slop they get paid out of everyone's monthly subscription payment. I want a streaming service where my money only goes to the artists I listen to - not to Taylor Swift and Suno artist #3141592.
jjfoooo4 5mo ago
From the press release, it's not all that clear what Deezer is doing about it. 44% of uploads getting less than 1% of non-fraudulent streams seems like a pretty strong reason to outright ban AI generated submissions. For the non-fraudulent listens, I'm very curious how many of these are part of auto-generated playlists. Are people just being served this music as part of a feed, or are they actually seeking it out? I'd be very surprised if it was the latter.
us321 5mo ago
Deez what?
advisedwang 5mo ago
> 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company This is the nut. This isn't actual AI generated music. It isn't intended to be real music that people listen and enjoy. It's just filler to populate tracks that pay out to scammers, so that scammers can direct bots and hijacked accounts to play their tracks and steal a share of the platform revenue.
- Lalabadie 5mo ago
  Yep, that (majority!) amount of load on the infrastructure exists to try to win the rat race for whatever percentage of revenue comes from songs that are streamed regardless of their origin.
- mrweasel 5mo ago
  Exactly, and that's the problem. The reasoning for creating the music is the problem, not that an artist wanted to use AI to generate something or experiment. It's not even muzak at this point, at least that honest about what it is and why it exists. It's the music version of the automated AI videos on YouTube, which takes a Reddit posts, have an AI do a voice over and then run Subway Surfer in the background (Though I haven't seen one of them in months).
  - btown 5mo ago
    That's the old meta, now it's Tumblr post voiceovers overlaid on Minecraft parkour runs!
- kingstnap 5mo ago
  The way revenue works on these platforms is fundamentally broken. Revenue should be considered per user to artists they listened to per month. This is actually how YouTube Premium works. Right now the way that revenue split works is you pool together all the cash from humans and hand it to whoever has the most bots.
  - dimaor 5mo ago
    you described the spotify revenue model, AFAIK deezer does _user to artists_. based on an article I've read 2 years ago.
oliwarner 5mo ago
... And most streams are fraudulent. I'm not sure I'd care if AI generated music was competing against my own organic music, but having the stream-reward diluted down by bots is actually hurting artists.
iainctduncan 5mo ago
Grifters' gonna grift. The streaming indy pop world is toast. On the other hand, this does seem to be rekindling, at least somewhat, an interest in people going to see small shows of real people making music. Which was historically what music was about for the vast majority of our human history. Mass market pop as a viable business was a particularly 20th century anomaly. And oddly, in people buying real vinyl by real people.
01100011 5mo ago
To quote Fugazi, "It don't matter what they're sellin, it's what you're buying." Who cares if people are mass uploading AI content? I care what the listen rates are.
- dolebirchwood 5mo ago
  With songs like "A Million Amelias"... millions, apparently.
- chromacity 5mo ago
  No matter how many AI tracks I blocked / downvoted on Spotify, they kept recommending them to me. It made me cancel my account. The thing is, from the consumer point of view, you can barely tell if it's playing in the background. Even if 90% of the streams are fraudulent, the remaining 10% is still real people who are none the wiser, but who would probably rather patronize human artists if given the choice.
- zamadatix 5mo ago
  It's mostly the extremely high levels of fraud associated with such submissions than the content in itself. In Deezer's case: > The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company. If they were more commonly consumed by real revenue generating users then these companies likely wouldn't care as much. As it stands, it saves them a lot of money at very little real user downside to try to catch the fraud at both ends (the fake listeners + the fake uploads) rather than just one end.
nitwit005 5mo ago
> The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company. > Today’s announcement comes as Deezer conducted a survey last November that found that 97% of participants couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and human-made music. Unable to tell it wasn't made by a human, but they can tell it's not very good apparently.
input_sh 5mo ago
Something's missing completely from both this article and I don't see it mentioned anywhere in the comments: Deezer will tag it and refuse to promote it once it's tagged as such. You're not gonna stumble upon it by leaving the autoplay on and it will not appear on any of its editorial playlists. Quite frankly this problem would be completely gone if every streaming service implemented this same policy. Deezer also does some other things right: they boost the artist payout if the listener intentionally searches for an artist/song/album instead of stumbles upon it via autoplay/playlists, they introduced lossless audio a decade before Spotify, and you don't even need an API key to interact with its metadata (of course you need to oblige by their rate limits). Some criticism so that this doesn't look like a pure promotion: their apps are absolute crap in comparison to Spotify and Apple Music, and even in comparison with TIDAL, which itself isn't really a pinnacle of user experience. It's definitely the most frustrating one out of the bunch that I have direct experience with.
- lumiukko 5mo ago
  Same is true for Qobuz. Pays artists really well, is EU located, but their applications (although they support a lot of platforms) are still a little rough around the edges.
  - anderber 5mo ago
    I found Qobuz recommendations really bad too, unfortunately.
- anderber 5mo ago
  I agree with your assessment. I have to say that their Android app is not very good. Serviceable, but not good. I heard their iOS app is better. I REALLY like their web app. Fast and smooth.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5mo ago
Given how little skill/effort is required for AI-generating music (compared to making it "from scratch"), I find it surprising that they're getting more human-created music than AI generated music. I would have expected something like 10x-100x more AI submissions than human ones.
jnwatson 5mo ago
Does Deezer charge per song? Sounds like a free backup service to me.
AbraKdabra 5mo ago
I really don't care if it's AI, I love music and it's 100% subjective to what I like, I'm not less moral if I prefer some ones and zeroes than a real band if it pleases my ears. I created a lot of songs in Suno which I really really like and have been in my playlist for months alongside the bands I have listened for more than 30 years.
- rzmmm 5mo ago
  I agree with you, but I hope they prevent people uploading thousands of AI generated albums. If people start doing that, it can become difficult for non-AI artists to gain visibility in the recommendation systems etc.
  - AbraKdabra 5mo ago
    Why prevent? You can solve that by marking them with a red size 72 font text saying "AI generated".
Sol- 5mo ago
Does that really matter? Eventually it will be 99%, but even then I am not necessarily concerned until it crowds out human created songs. Before AI, 99% of anything was trash and now with AI, perhaps 99.9% is. But the thing that matters is whether the remaining 1% or 0.1% is good or meaningful for us or not. Though I guess soon enough even AI music will be meaningful for us, but I don't think this precludes the existence of human musicians.
- tokioyoyo 5mo ago
  People who have been listening to music their entire lives isn’t the target audience. It’s mostly getting the young generations used to it, and accept it as a norm. Something about most people’s music taste formalize around high school/university times. It’s close to how young people have never experienced pre-Fortnite/Roblox times, so they are fine with shelling out money for microtransactions.
- Zopieux 5mo ago
  How do you discover human-made songs in an ocean of slop? One of the reasons I subscribed to a music platform back in the day was the ability to discover new artists, and I found my fair share! This is close to impossible nowadays, though I'm now giving Deezer a try since they're the only one doing something about it. Glad I cancelled Spotify 3y ago.
curvaturearth 5mo ago
Great reason to steer clear of deezer
- anderber 5mo ago
  Why is that? They're being honest and reporting their numbers. Other platforms are not telling you.
KnuthIsGod 5mo ago
"97% of participants couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and human-made music."
- anderber 5mo ago
  Is this the new Coke vs Pepsi challenge?
graphememes 5mo ago
If your goal is to create something you enjoy, do not labor over the process of how you do that, try everything, be a kid again, simply lose yourself in the joy of that thing, even if it contains "using ai" it's not a bad thing, it's merely another tool, like your DAW or photoshop. Also, lastly, have fun, be frustrated, get angry, be excited, be mad. Making music is fun, you don't have to make the process harder. If you want to make money, good luck.
nemo44x 5mo ago
The funny thing about AI is counterintuitive. It will put an even higher value on quality as quantity is now essentially worthless. I don’t believe AI can generate high quality on its own. It needs to be used and manipulated to generate higher quality outputs than a human or AI alone can.
bilsbie 5mo ago
Is there a way to listen to say the top ten AI songs?
thomasjudge 5mo ago
Anyone else is this the first you've heard of "Deezer"?
- werdnapk 5mo ago
  I'm in Canada and have been a Deezer subscriber for almost 2 decades now. Their premium subscription is well worth the money - I pay less than $90 for the year. They also have one of the highest track counts available compared to other streaming services (according to google).
- anderber 5mo ago
  They're not as popular in N. America, but they have some really neat feature. Including uploading your own MP3s and labelling of AI tracks.
cultureulterior 5mo ago
This is good and cool.
gwern 5mo ago
> In addition to detecting, tagging and removing AI-generated music from recommendations, Deezer has now stopped storing hi-res versions of AI-tracks Important point for anyone out there thinking about generating a lot of samples. Expect to get increasingly filtered out if you don't emphasize quality or uniqueness or something. It's cheaper to detect that something is generated, and apply standard base rate reasoning 'it's probably slop' and filter it out, than to try to do expensive evaluation to look for the rare gems.
twelvedogs 5mo ago
Of course, it takes 2 seconds to shit out an ai song. I'm surprised it isn't way higher
Animats 5mo ago
How do they tell? Because they're awful? Some of them might be good. And many, if not most, songs created by unknown artists are terrible.
spamizbad 5mo ago
How much of this is driven by passive income "entrepreneurs" trying to get their AI-generated tracks placed on playlists to gather streaming revenue? Normally an artist might release 10-15 tracks per year tops, but with AI you can easily churn out hundreds of tracks explicitly targeting trending playlists and (in theory) make a few thousand a month in royalties.
dotcoma 5mo ago
They call it UGC, user-generated content. I’ve been calling it UGB for a long time, the B standing for Bullshit.
0x1ceb00da 5mo ago
Do any of these AI music generators produce output that can be iterated upon like the output of coding agents?
- wsve 5mo ago
  Probably yes, but let's hope not
iamsaitam 5mo ago
It's damn time for streaming platforms to allow users to filter out AI music. Better than that, would be for the EU to regulate this and to demand an opt-out by default for every streaming provider.
niea_11 5mo ago
A video by Le Monde (french newspaper) showing that you can have an ai song ready and distributed to several platforms in less than one hour : https://youtu.be/G3d8wBOLS2c?is=meGcHQZtpcRFRUsj https://youtu.be/G3d8wBOLS2c?is=meGcHQZtpcRFRUsj (The original video is in french but it has an autodubbed english track)
num42 5mo ago
These days YouTube has so much AI generated music, very hard to differentiate from originals. For examples look at these YT channels uploading AI generated music: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6Xw8Jrwf009nHTV165UuQw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6Xw8Jrwf009nHTV165UuQw https://www.youtube.com/@ForeverDisco80s/videos https://www.youtube.com/@ForeverDisco80s/videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQn7ZUixKXg&list=RDMQn7ZUixKXg&start_radio=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQn7ZUixKXg&list=RDMQn7ZUixK... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUph_6i5Pr0&list=RDWUph_6i5Pr0&start_radio=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUph_6i5Pr0&list=RDWUph_6i5P... so on..I think uncountable amount of AI gen stuff is uploaded to YT everyday
- unsupp0rted 5mo ago
  Yup, a lot of these AI songs are just plain good: https://youtu.be/nwBDmUdX8Io https://youtu.be/nwBDmUdX8Io If you heard these on the radio while working at a grocery store in 1983 you'd be begging your local music store to sell them to you. To me this AI-generated "slop" is much more enjoyable than human-generated slop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPAg7ODubB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPAg7ODubB4 Where "slop" = "what can I put out that I don't love but that people will click on?"
  - fallingfrog 5mo ago
    Sorry, but that music is really boring. I certainly would not have bought it in 1983. But, you're right that the average person on the street probably can't tell the difference. Music out there in the real world runs in clusters and communities that form around real world places where people go to be together and make and share things. Its so much more colorful and interesting than you can imagine. But, it is admittedly just a small slice of the weirdest and most creative and crazy people who participate in those communities. For everyone else music is just a recording that appears out of thin air in their car stereo without context and the glossiest product is the one they pick. What do you think of this? https://youtu.be/5KszaGOsFR8?si=YVorLTuTMr7jjAvY https://youtu.be/5KszaGOsFR8?si=YVorLTuTMr7jjAvY Or this? https://youtu.be/pdEmM79MRmU?si=CMGkWs6CyZxXyVaH https://youtu.be/pdEmM79MRmU?si=CMGkWs6CyZxXyVaH Or this? https://youtu.be/Bdzt39vX1Sw?si=06NNB4m0xuB7Lcbl https://youtu.be/Bdzt39vX1Sw?si=06NNB4m0xuB7Lcbl
Akuehne 5mo ago
With the majority of popular music decided by a handful of people in LA, Nashville, or New York, let me ask one question: is this actually a bad thing? Hear me out. Most of what's on the radio could have been made by AI already and no one would've noticed the difference. To be clear, I'm not talking about legitimate artists doing something original or authentic. I'm talking about the execs who find performers to sing and dance over their perfectly manufactured hit single. Songs made by people like Max Martin, who aren't trying to express anything beyond their knowledge of which combination of notes has the highest ROI. No disrespect to Max, he's incredibly talented at what he does. But now the execs have the data, and they don't need the Max Martins, Diane Warrens, or Carole Kings anymore. They can plug in the numbers and out comes a perfect song for their next artist. So let's embrace the new AI pop. Let it dethrone the kings who've shaped the sound of pop culture for too long. Real art always seems to find its fans eventually, and I don't think AI will stop that. Yet. When a model writes a song that lingers the way "Linger" does, maybe it will. But at that point, if the music really is that good, does it matter?
- gbanfalvi 5mo ago
  > Real art always seems to find its fans eventually, and I don't think AI will stop that. That's what's happening though. Someone is writing a prompt, generating some slop and then directing bots to collect money that will never make it to real artists. If they were getting too small of a slice before, now it's even smaller. > But at that point, if the music really is that good, does it matter? We're very far from "that point". The point we're at right now, which we need to tackle is the one in which we're drowning in slop. I'm not personally against using AI tools to write code or help someone generate music, but right now it just impedes, devalues and deplatforms the real stuff to make money from a system that hasn't caught up.
pixel_popping 5mo ago
I love AI generated music, I think people aren't objectively interested in ranking it and appreciating it enough probably because of the attach to artists behind songs, but in reality, practically speaking, it's getting SOLID.

367 points by FiddlerClamp 5mo ago

captainkrtek 5mo ago

Do any of the major streaming platforms have a stance against AI generated music?

devindotcom 5mo ago
bandcamp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605490
saaaaaam 5mo ago
No, not really. Spotify is trialling a voluntary “AI Credits” thing where people can highlight use of AI when they release music. https://support.spotify.com/lc/artists/article/ai-credits/ https://support.spotify.com/lc/artists/article/ai-credits/ The problem is that subjective judgements by streaming platforms on where an AI line is drawn in music production is difficult. If you human-write a song but use AI to produce a synth stem or bass stem and then mix it down and use AI mastering is that better or worse than if you use AI to help you write something but record with human musicians and a bit of AI assist? And what if you use AI entirely to write and compose but use human performers to record? And what if the AI is trained only on licensed content?
- add-sub-mul-div 5mo ago
  There's a whole spectrum from sfw to nsfw but we don't give up and allow porn on every platform because drawing the line is "difficult". We can use common sense and taste, with all their flaws.
  - TremendousJudge 5mo ago
    I wouldn't say that porn is not allowed on every platform. basically every mainstream "content posting" platform (fb, ig, tw, tiktok, etc) allows softcore porn, and in fact pushes it on users, both on content an on advertising. if the same was true with AI music I wouldn't bother with the platform
- chromacity 5mo ago
  Honestly, debating these corner cases feels like a distraction tactic. The reality is that the bulk of that 44% is total AI slop: one-sentence prompts entered into Suno to generate 1,000 tracks and extract money from subscribers who stream in the background. It's the same thing with writing. No one cares that you asked a chatbot to help you reword a paragraph in your essay. The problem is zero-effort slop delivered by the truckload to your social media feed.
  - ctoth 5mo ago
    If... If you're pulling from something called a feed ... Are you really surprised to get slop in it?
    - Kye 5mo ago
      You're thinking of a feed trough, like for pigs. This use of feed comes from news services.
  - harrall 5mo ago
    It’s not a corner case when you have to enforce it. Someone will end up in the middle and then you’ll be responsible for accepting or rejecting it. The bulk is obvious but the debate isn’t for the obvious.
    - chromacity 5mo ago
      But it doesn't. We have a problem. We can focus on addressing the problem without pre-adjudicating every hypothetical corner case. If your "work" is mostly AI, and if you don't disclose it, it goes to /dev/null. And yeah, you can get into a debate that it's unfair to reject 51% but allow 49%, but that's how the real world works - otherwise, nothing would ever get done. You also get a DUI for BAC of 0.08% but not 0.07%. That's not an argument for putting DUI laws on hold until we can figure out a more perfect approach.
      - saaaaaam 5mo ago
- gwern 5mo ago
  > The problem is that subjective judgements by streaming platforms on where an AI line is drawn in music production is difficult. This may be more of an economic problem. There is a stark difference between a music track with 1% human work/effort, and 0%. You can make many musical tracks if you have to do only 1% of the work, but you can't make >100x what you made without AI (Amdahl's law). While the latter can scale infinitely; you could upload a billion tracks if you wished, you're limited basically by bandwidth and automation. So a classifier or policy which permitted the 99% AI but banned the 100% AI may be adequate.

devindotcom 5mo ago

however you might feel about AI generated media, flooding platforms with unlabeled slop is nothing but scammer behavior and we should take serious measures to disincentivize it for both the uploaders and service providers. I do suspect we are in for a lot of verified-human platforms where your fee goes to supporting establishing an artist or author's humanity beyond a reasonable doubt.

ambicapter 5mo ago
Is it free to upload these files? Maybe a 1¢ fee would be enough to kill a majority of the spam.
- saaaaaam 5mo ago
  Effectively yes. There are plenty of music distributors that have “no fee” distribution where they simply take a percentage of any royalties. I suspect we are going to see that model quickly go out of favour though.
  - TremendousJudge 5mo ago
    really? there are ways of putting music on Spotify that don't involve paying a fee upfront at any time?
    - mjr00 5mo ago
      Yes, last I checked at least LANDR, Amuse and Tunecore all had plans where you release for free and they take a % of royalties.
    - saaaaaam 5mo ago
      Yes, lots.
hombre_fatal 5mo ago
What does human verification look like when you grant that it’s impossible to tell?

MORPHOICES 5mo ago

[dead]

milesvp 5mo ago

Not sure what algorithm Deezer is using, but Benn Jordan is a fairly tech savvy musician who talks about ways to id AI generated music by looking for compression artifacts used by the training data. https://youtu.be/QVXfcIb3OKo?si=74EdIey6RIhuwdzg https://youtu.be/QVXfcIb3OKo?si=74EdIey6RIhuwdzg

saaaaaam 5mo ago
This is apparently how Deezer is doing it.
8note 5mo ago
it will still miss the ai authoring the music, and a human performing it
- moron4hire 5mo ago
  It will also miss music performed by a stack of cartoon raccoons in a trench coat and music performed by God, so I don't get what point there is in mentioning other fictional characters.
- redsocksfan45 5mo ago
  [dead]

nottorp 5mo ago

So we'll be going back to publishers as curators. Good for the publishers, I guess.

r_lee 5mo ago
this seems like a pattern seen across industries when it comes to AI even more consolidation and lock in
subscribed 5mo ago
As an user I wouldn't mind as long as it's attributed and I can skip it. Pisses me off on YouTube - it's really hard to find something genuine in the sea of the AI written, AI subbed, AI generated and AI published - it's a scourge not because it's there, but because the channels are lying about it AND because 99.99999% of what I encountered it's not worth the waste heat processing a "publish 100 catchy videos about current affairs".
starkeeper 5mo ago
On a similar note I recently deleted a whole bunch of automated tests because if the AI is going to write most of the code then I should test it to make sure it's good! This won't work for all projects, but for my indie games it's a good idea.
- rectang 5mo ago
  > I recently deleted a whole bunch of automated tests because if the AI is going to write most of the code then I should test it to make sure it's good! ?? You say you deleted the tests, because you "should test it"? The logic seems inconsistent. Sanity checking LLM-generated code with LLM-generated automated tests is low-cost and high-yield because LLMs are really good at writing tests.
  - otabdeveloper4 5mo ago
    > ...because LLMs are really good at writing tests. No, they're absolutely shit at writing tests. Writing tests is mostly about risk and threat analysis, which LLMs can't do. (This is why LLMs write "tests" that check if inputs are equal to outputs or flip `==` to `!=`, etc.)

jasongrishkoff 5mo ago

I've been working hard at this over at SubmitHub, developing a way to detect AI songs: https://www.submithub.com/ai-song-checker https://www.submithub.com/ai-song-checker These days roughly 20% of the songs coming through our platform for promotion are AI-generated. Roughly 75% of them are honest and declare their AI usage - but another 25% try to hide it. Some of them are actually writing scripts to "clean" their audio so that it can bypass detection.

cleversomething 5mo ago
This is an aside, but thank you for doing this work! As a musician who plays real instruments and submits real songs to Submithub, it's nice to know that hard work is going into validation and prevention of scammers passing off AI as their own talent. Keep fighting the good fight.
- CharlesW 5mo ago
  "AI detectors" are fun like horoscopes are fun, until they flag your music as AI generated, and distribution channels blacklist you and your label sues you. On the bright side, you can sue the creator of the AI detector in return.
  - input_sh 5mo ago
    The only reason you're saying that is because you haven't tried to build such a detector yourself. It's not like text where it's impossible to tell reliably if something's AI generated or not, from a technical perspective it's very trivial to detect anything coming straight out of a Suno/Udio prompt. Nobody open sourced their detection algorithm as that would just trigger a cat-and-mouse game between Suno/Udio and a detection platform (and Suno/Udio have way more VC money than you do), but plenty are being sold as a service and work very reliably.
    - CharlesW 5mo ago
      > …from a technical perspective it's very trivial to detect anything coming straight out of a Suno/Udio prompt. It's trivial to vibe-code something that detects watermarked output and accidental model fingerprints. But next week the watermarks will be defeated, and the accidental fingerprints will change and ultimately disappear. It's not possible to generally solve the "To what degree is this audio AI generated?" problem, any more than it has been to solve the same problem for text and images. https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/teach/ai-detectors-dont-work/ https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/teach/ai-detectors-dont-wo...

marsven_422 5mo ago

[dead]

mjr00 5mo ago

I wonder how much of this even matters. Sounds like it doesn't (aside from taking up space on Deezer's drives). > The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company. Even pre-AI, music has always been a winners-take-most business. Per an article from 2022, the vast majority of artists have fewer than 50 monthly listeners[0], which I suspect is far lower now due to the flood of AI. Not sure about Deezer, but for Spotify there is some kind of minimum to get you into any algorithmic rotation. People try to game this with bots, i.e. botted streams, but the problem with bots is that the accounts are bots, so the recommendations just become music for other bots, hence the part where 85% of the streams are botted. So it doesn't actually work, and you have to rely on old-fashioned promotion to get into any algorithmic playlists. So 44% of uploads being AI-generated sounds bad, but it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever encounter them naturally, the same way that people don't naturally discover random, non-AI artists with 10 monthly listeners and tracks with less than 1000 plays. This isn't a defense of AI music slop, by the way; it's more pointing out that the "making a song" part only takes you about 20% of the way to becoming an artist people want to listen to. A harsh lesson our friends in /r/SunoAI are learning. [0] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/over-75-of-artists-on-spotify-have-fewer-than-50-monthly-listeners/ https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/over-75-of-artists-on...

rectang 5mo ago
44% of uploads are probably not created by 44% of "artists". The core of people who are looking to exploit the system are going to be good at gaming the recommendation algorithm — they're specialists in it solely for the money who don't need to trouble themselves with artistic concerns.
- mjr00 5mo ago
  I'm not saying it's impossible, but at a minimum it's extremely hard to game the recommendation algorithm (primarily talking about Spotify, maybe Deezer's is less sophisticated). The best way to "game" the recommendation algorithm, to kickstart a new/less-established artist profile, is to get onto popular playlists. However these playlists either have actual quality barriers (so they won't put AI slop music on) or they take $$ (so this doesn't really work with the "mass generated AI slop" approach).

wenbin 5mo ago

Similar stats for podcasts - https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-stats/#growth https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-stats/#growth

cdrnsf 5mo ago

I remain happy with my decision to leave streaming behind and curate my own listening around artists I know, recommendations from people I trust and a complete absence of any and all of this worthless slop.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

jagged-chisel 5mo ago

Tangent: I assume this “AI-generated” music is created the same way an LLM generates text: use samples from a corpus strung together into a new [derivative] output. But it seems plausible that algorithmic generation can be used at any stage of the process. How much disclosure do we (listeners) require? At what point is it unacceptable “AI-generated” music? The answers are going to be subjective. And human. And dealing with this, I think, is going to take a direction like the “typewriters in college” headline from a few days ago - human involvement, low automation … things that don’t scale.

Kye 5mo ago
My understanding is music generation is more like stable diffusion. It generates a waveform as an image, then turns it into an audio file.
- cubefox 5mo ago
  They do use diffusion models, but I don't think they would make a detour via images. They can just generate audio directly with audio diffusion rather than image diffusion.
  - corysama 5mo ago
    There technically was one experiment early on to trick Stable Diffusion into generating spectrograms that could be converted into audio. And, it worked surprisingly well. https://web.archive.org/web/20230314190913/https://www.riffusion.com/about https://web.archive.org/web/20230314190913/https://www.riffu... https://huggingface.co/riffusion/riffusion-model-v1 https://huggingface.co/riffusion/riffusion-model-v1 But, I'd expect everything in the past 3 years to diffuse the audio waveform directly.
    - Kye 5mo ago
      That's probably what I was thinking of. I haven't kept up as much on non-text generative AI.
5mo ago

palmotea 5mo ago

Great job guys! Almost halfway there! Keep working hard and we can make it to 100%! Remember: AI use is mandatory and non-negotiable. Hopefully the Trump administration will be rolling out AI-use metrics for the whole population, so we can track progress against our goals.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

Keyframe 5mo ago

Youtube got hit by massive downfall in quality by this as well. It's absurd.

ymolodtsov 5mo ago

Most of the videos uploaded to YouTube are worthless. AI simplifies the creation, doesn't mean it's good and will be listened to. And if it will, then what's the problem? You can talk about ethics, IP, etc. but we're not even there yet.

Forgeties79 5mo ago
That is theoretically how one would think it would play out but that’s not what happens in reality. Instead it becomes like blog spam where it becomes impossible to actually find what you’re looking for because you’re wading through so much crap you don’t want. Also, a lot of us value the fact that music is made by a person. Digital tools have been around for a long time and people have bickered about that, but ultimately they still require a person with some knowledge to sit down and actually produce the music, to do the thing. Writing prompts until you get something interesting can be fine, but what people are doing is carpet bombing us with whatever nonsense comes out because they have a financial incentive to do so. I have plenty of experiments back when I did more digital music where I would mess with frequency modulators and such until I just found something interesting. I don’t see the harm in activities like that. But that’s not really what’s happening here. It’s deliberately lazy, corner cutting work to spam music platforms for profit. Yes there is a gray area between these two scenarios but that gray area isn’t the problem.
- tombert 5mo ago
  Honestly I think the thing that most humans appreciate is effort. Using AI tools is not inherently "bad", but these very-literally mass produced AI songs are almost by definition low-effort and as a result pretty bland and unlikeable. Digital music has always been fine to me, as long as the song being produced feels like it took a human some amount of effort.
  - gedy 5mo ago
    Yeah I agree with that nuance, as I personally enjoy making AI covers of songs I like in genres that I can't produce myself (old vintage blues covers of 80s new wave songs if you must know). It's a fair amount of work prompting and curating (and editing in some cases). I think they are cool and have shared a few, but they do tend to get lumped in with "ai slop" and some people take offense.

anticorporate 5mo ago

I've had to change my video and music consumption habits, because I fall asleep fairly often with either music or videos playing in the background (bad habit, I know). I'm always sure to switch to a playlist running locally when I get tired, because I'll be damned if someone's slop is going to get monetized while I sleep and the algorithm starts sneaking that crap in.

strangegecko 5mo ago

I'm trying to learn music production with a DAW, sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting my time. Part of my reason for trying this was reading how creative endeavors can be therapeutic (I'm dealing with burnout/depression/cptsd). I'm at the stage where sometimes I make something that sounds good (to me) but I know it requires work (in the "not fun" sense) to finish it and even then, it will likely never be appreciated by anyone but myself. Which isn't a problem if the process itself is joyful, but I have to admit I've always struggled to enjoy anything that doesn't involve other people in some way (shared goal or approval of some form). None of these problems are "new", but I feel like AI is making this question of "why do it" or "what is worth doing" even more urgent. Kind of wondering how others are affected by all this, if at all.

pojzon 5mo ago
AI makes or will make everyone question doing „any” creative work. The real question you should ask yourself is „Do I care?” If you do it for yourself - do it. If you learn that to make money - forget about it.
taneq 5mo ago
The not-fun work isn’t on the song, it’s on you. Improving the song is a byproduct. This only really becomes apparent over time but you’ll realise you were working on yourself all along.
izzydata 5mo ago
I am hopeful that in the near future once AI has saturated as much of everything that it can that it will actually become even more worth it to do things. At least for me the only reason to experience art in any form is that there was human intent behind it. Thus making human generated content more valuable compared to the flood of empty AI content.
lacunary 5mo ago
I'm having fun building elaborate software that meets my needs precisely and nobody else's. I mean, maybe it would meet other's needs but that production would take away from the fun and learning I have building it, and would also reduce its utility for me personally.

SwellJoe 5mo ago

This shit is so dark. I mean, popular music has always been pretty formulaic, and prone to imitation and trite bullshit, but at least when humans were making it, you'd occasionally get some spark of genius, real originality, even in the most mundane forms. I use LLMs for code every day, but if I could flip a switch to turn it all off and prevent this shit from happening to the arts, I probably would.

mikojan 5mo ago
"Probably"? I'd hit that a thousand times just to be sure. Don't understand how one can experience anything but infinite dread when confronted with the effects of these models on the arts. Maybe I am getting old. But I don't think so...
- pesus 5mo ago
  If I had to guess, I'd say that it's actually more of a young person thing to want to get rid of all AI. I've only ever seen older people wearing a shirt with an AI generated image on it. I would absolutely push that button a thousand times as well.
- SwellJoe 5mo ago
  I mean, there are some positive uses for the technology, some will likely save lives and advance the frontier in medicine and science. The ways it's able to automate research tasks is a pretty big deal. And, even though I know that, I think with the harm it's doing to our humanity with all this slop overwhelming everything (the web is now more slop than human, YouTube and every music streaming app soon will be), it's maybe not worth it. I don't know how to balance those two things. And, I don't know how you'd regulate it to make it safe, even if we had politicians anywhere who wanted to.
TheMagicHorsey 5mo ago
Butlerian Jihad vibes are building.
Bud 5mo ago
[dead]

arc_light 5mo ago

[dead]

dukeofdoom 5mo ago

I can see this being useful for solo game devs

wao0uuno 5mo ago
Ah yes, vibe coded games with AI slop soundtrack. The future of gaming couldn't look any brighter.
- dukeofdoom 5mo ago
  That might be true, but if you watch some of the youtube videos from solo game devs where they spend 5 years making a game, and come out with 28k in sales. Anything that brings a game concept to market faster I think is a win for everyone.
  - wao0uuno 5mo ago
    Not really. We don't need more games. We need better quality games made with passion. More than a thousand new games are added to Steam every week. It's all just noise.
pesus 5mo ago
Maybe useful for ensuring their reputation gets tarnished.
bandrami 5mo ago
If the music isn't important enough to write it's not important enough to put in the game in the first place. Solo game devs can use csound.

ashleyn 5mo ago

I wonder if this will lead to a sort of "open sourcing" of music, where the reputation of what one produces will be improved by releasing the raw DAW files/tracks/etc. Even if AI is used to generate the constituent parts of a manually-assembled track, it would still demonstrate to listeners that there was significant human involvement in the process. Touring, merch, etc will also serve as good "proof of give-a-shit".

UtopiaPunk 5mo ago
That would be neat, but I really don't see it happening. In software-land, it's my sense that, if anything, AI is working against open source. AI is creating busy work for open source maintainers with a large volume of low quality PRs, and scrapers are burdening those who maintain their own small-scale, public facing infrastructure. Meanwhile, AI is ingesting their publicly available data to improve itself, with the implicit (if not explicit) goal of making those projects irrelevant (why read the docs, participate in a forum or chat, or submit a PR when you can ask your AI thing to just write the code you want instead?). Furthermore, if a software developer is of the opinion that AI is "bad" in some way and they want to resist it, I think it would make the most sense to keep their code private. Open source is feeding AI.

TheMagicHorsey 5mo ago

What a coincidence. Just today, someone on my high school alumni group just posted an album they "made", which is 100% AI generated music. They claim authorship because they created the prompts to the AI. My feeling is that if the AI is this good, the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman.

jjfoooo4 5mo ago
> My feeling is that if the AI is this good, the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman. I call this the instant imitator trap. If anything AI generates stands out from the slop, the slop generators will just imitate it, thus quickly making whatever standout quality from the "original" work also slop. I wrote about it here: https://tombedor.dev/creativity/ https://tombedor.dev/creativity/
redwall_hp 5mo ago
Good news: the courts (all the way up to the Supreme Court, which declined the appeal) have upheld the Copyright Office's assertion that their album is public domain and ineligible for copyright protection. Prompts are insufficient human authorship, which is a requirement for copyright to apply. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-declines-hear-dispute-over-copyrights-ai-generated-material-2026-03-02/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-de... Arguably, this makes sending such an album to a distributor a contractual violation as well, since you must assert that you own the rights to license it to them and are empowering them to collect royalties on your behalf.
userbinator 5mo ago
the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman It seems like "personalised recommendations" are heading in that direction, but don't forget there's also the social aspect --- listeners will want to share what they liked the most, so even if they end up automatically prompting the AI to generate exactly the music they want, they'll find others who also like very similar music.

AlexandrB 5mo ago

This is incentivized by how streaming compensates artists. If these folks can also bot a bunch of "listens" to this slop they get paid out of everyone's monthly subscription payment. I want a streaming service where my money only goes to the artists I listen to - not to Taylor Swift and Suno artist #3141592.

jjfoooo4 5mo ago

From the press release, it's not all that clear what Deezer is doing about it. 44% of uploads getting less than 1% of non-fraudulent streams seems like a pretty strong reason to outright ban AI generated submissions. For the non-fraudulent listens, I'm very curious how many of these are part of auto-generated playlists. Are people just being served this music as part of a feed, or are they actually seeking it out? I'd be very surprised if it was the latter.

us321 5mo ago

Deez what?

advisedwang 5mo ago

> 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company This is the nut. This isn't actual AI generated music. It isn't intended to be real music that people listen and enjoy. It's just filler to populate tracks that pay out to scammers, so that scammers can direct bots and hijacked accounts to play their tracks and steal a share of the platform revenue.

Lalabadie 5mo ago
Yep, that (majority!) amount of load on the infrastructure exists to try to win the rat race for whatever percentage of revenue comes from songs that are streamed regardless of their origin.
mrweasel 5mo ago
Exactly, and that's the problem. The reasoning for creating the music is the problem, not that an artist wanted to use AI to generate something or experiment. It's not even muzak at this point, at least that honest about what it is and why it exists. It's the music version of the automated AI videos on YouTube, which takes a Reddit posts, have an AI do a voice over and then run Subway Surfer in the background (Though I haven't seen one of them in months).
- btown 5mo ago
  That's the old meta, now it's Tumblr post voiceovers overlaid on Minecraft parkour runs!
kingstnap 5mo ago
The way revenue works on these platforms is fundamentally broken. Revenue should be considered per user to artists they listened to per month. This is actually how YouTube Premium works. Right now the way that revenue split works is you pool together all the cash from humans and hand it to whoever has the most bots.
- dimaor 5mo ago
  you described the spotify revenue model, AFAIK deezer does _user to artists_. based on an article I've read 2 years ago.

oliwarner 5mo ago

... And most streams are fraudulent. I'm not sure I'd care if AI generated music was competing against my own organic music, but having the stream-reward diluted down by bots is actually hurting artists.

iainctduncan 5mo ago

Grifters' gonna grift. The streaming indy pop world is toast. On the other hand, this does seem to be rekindling, at least somewhat, an interest in people going to see small shows of real people making music. Which was historically what music was about for the vast majority of our human history. Mass market pop as a viable business was a particularly 20th century anomaly. And oddly, in people buying real vinyl by real people.

01100011 5mo ago

To quote Fugazi, "It don't matter what they're sellin, it's what you're buying." Who cares if people are mass uploading AI content? I care what the listen rates are.

dolebirchwood 5mo ago
With songs like "A Million Amelias"... millions, apparently.
chromacity 5mo ago
No matter how many AI tracks I blocked / downvoted on Spotify, they kept recommending them to me. It made me cancel my account. The thing is, from the consumer point of view, you can barely tell if it's playing in the background. Even if 90% of the streams are fraudulent, the remaining 10% is still real people who are none the wiser, but who would probably rather patronize human artists if given the choice.
zamadatix 5mo ago
It's mostly the extremely high levels of fraud associated with such submissions than the content in itself. In Deezer's case: > The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company. If they were more commonly consumed by real revenue generating users then these companies likely wouldn't care as much. As it stands, it saves them a lot of money at very little real user downside to try to catch the fraud at both ends (the fake listeners + the fake uploads) rather than just one end.

nitwit005 5mo ago

> The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company. > Today’s announcement comes as Deezer conducted a survey last November that found that 97% of participants couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and human-made music. Unable to tell it wasn't made by a human, but they can tell it's not very good apparently.

input_sh 5mo ago

Something's missing completely from both this article and I don't see it mentioned anywhere in the comments: Deezer will tag it and refuse to promote it once it's tagged as such. You're not gonna stumble upon it by leaving the autoplay on and it will not appear on any of its editorial playlists. Quite frankly this problem would be completely gone if every streaming service implemented this same policy. Deezer also does some other things right: they boost the artist payout if the listener intentionally searches for an artist/song/album instead of stumbles upon it via autoplay/playlists, they introduced lossless audio a decade before Spotify, and you don't even need an API key to interact with its metadata (of course you need to oblige by their rate limits). Some criticism so that this doesn't look like a pure promotion: their apps are absolute crap in comparison to Spotify and Apple Music, and even in comparison with TIDAL, which itself isn't really a pinnacle of user experience. It's definitely the most frustrating one out of the bunch that I have direct experience with.

lumiukko 5mo ago
Same is true for Qobuz. Pays artists really well, is EU located, but their applications (although they support a lot of platforms) are still a little rough around the edges.
- anderber 5mo ago
  I found Qobuz recommendations really bad too, unfortunately.
anderber 5mo ago
I agree with your assessment. I have to say that their Android app is not very good. Serviceable, but not good. I heard their iOS app is better. I REALLY like their web app. Fast and smooth.

tgsovlerkhgsel 5mo ago

Given how little skill/effort is required for AI-generating music (compared to making it "from scratch"), I find it surprising that they're getting more human-created music than AI generated music. I would have expected something like 10x-100x more AI submissions than human ones.

jnwatson 5mo ago

Does Deezer charge per song? Sounds like a free backup service to me.

AbraKdabra 5mo ago

I really don't care if it's AI, I love music and it's 100% subjective to what I like, I'm not less moral if I prefer some ones and zeroes than a real band if it pleases my ears. I created a lot of songs in Suno which I really really like and have been in my playlist for months alongside the bands I have listened for more than 30 years.

rzmmm 5mo ago
I agree with you, but I hope they prevent people uploading thousands of AI generated albums. If people start doing that, it can become difficult for non-AI artists to gain visibility in the recommendation systems etc.
- AbraKdabra 5mo ago
  Why prevent? You can solve that by marking them with a red size 72 font text saying "AI generated".

Sol- 5mo ago

Does that really matter? Eventually it will be 99%, but even then I am not necessarily concerned until it crowds out human created songs. Before AI, 99% of anything was trash and now with AI, perhaps 99.9% is. But the thing that matters is whether the remaining 1% or 0.1% is good or meaningful for us or not. Though I guess soon enough even AI music will be meaningful for us, but I don't think this precludes the existence of human musicians.

tokioyoyo 5mo ago
People who have been listening to music their entire lives isn’t the target audience. It’s mostly getting the young generations used to it, and accept it as a norm. Something about most people’s music taste formalize around high school/university times. It’s close to how young people have never experienced pre-Fortnite/Roblox times, so they are fine with shelling out money for microtransactions.
Zopieux 5mo ago
How do you discover human-made songs in an ocean of slop? One of the reasons I subscribed to a music platform back in the day was the ability to discover new artists, and I found my fair share! This is close to impossible nowadays, though I'm now giving Deezer a try since they're the only one doing something about it. Glad I cancelled Spotify 3y ago.

curvaturearth 5mo ago

Great reason to steer clear of deezer

anderber 5mo ago
Why is that? They're being honest and reporting their numbers. Other platforms are not telling you.

KnuthIsGod 5mo ago

"97% of participants couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and human-made music."

anderber 5mo ago
Is this the new Coke vs Pepsi challenge?

graphememes 5mo ago

If your goal is to create something you enjoy, do not labor over the process of how you do that, try everything, be a kid again, simply lose yourself in the joy of that thing, even if it contains "using ai" it's not a bad thing, it's merely another tool, like your DAW or photoshop. Also, lastly, have fun, be frustrated, get angry, be excited, be mad. Making music is fun, you don't have to make the process harder. If you want to make money, good luck.

nemo44x 5mo ago

The funny thing about AI is counterintuitive. It will put an even higher value on quality as quantity is now essentially worthless. I don’t believe AI can generate high quality on its own. It needs to be used and manipulated to generate higher quality outputs than a human or AI alone can.

bilsbie 5mo ago

Is there a way to listen to say the top ten AI songs?

thomasjudge 5mo ago

Anyone else is this the first you've heard of "Deezer"?

werdnapk 5mo ago
I'm in Canada and have been a Deezer subscriber for almost 2 decades now. Their premium subscription is well worth the money - I pay less than $90 for the year. They also have one of the highest track counts available compared to other streaming services (according to google).
anderber 5mo ago
They're not as popular in N. America, but they have some really neat feature. Including uploading your own MP3s and labelling of AI tracks.

cultureulterior 5mo ago

This is good and cool.

gwern 5mo ago

> In addition to detecting, tagging and removing AI-generated music from recommendations, Deezer has now stopped storing hi-res versions of AI-tracks Important point for anyone out there thinking about generating a lot of samples. Expect to get increasingly filtered out if you don't emphasize quality or uniqueness or something. It's cheaper to detect that something is generated, and apply standard base rate reasoning 'it's probably slop' and filter it out, than to try to do expensive evaluation to look for the rare gems.

twelvedogs 5mo ago

Of course, it takes 2 seconds to shit out an ai song. I'm surprised it isn't way higher

Animats 5mo ago

How do they tell? Because they're awful? Some of them might be good. And many, if not most, songs created by unknown artists are terrible.

spamizbad 5mo ago

How much of this is driven by passive income "entrepreneurs" trying to get their AI-generated tracks placed on playlists to gather streaming revenue? Normally an artist might release 10-15 tracks per year tops, but with AI you can easily churn out hundreds of tracks explicitly targeting trending playlists and (in theory) make a few thousand a month in royalties.

dotcoma 5mo ago

They call it UGC, user-generated content. I’ve been calling it UGB for a long time, the B standing for Bullshit.

0x1ceb00da 5mo ago

Do any of these AI music generators produce output that can be iterated upon like the output of coding agents?

wsve 5mo ago
Probably yes, but let's hope not

iamsaitam 5mo ago

It's damn time for streaming platforms to allow users to filter out AI music. Better than that, would be for the EU to regulate this and to demand an opt-out by default for every streaming provider.

niea_11 5mo ago

A video by Le Monde (french newspaper) showing that you can have an ai song ready and distributed to several platforms in less than one hour : https://youtu.be/G3d8wBOLS2c?is=meGcHQZtpcRFRUsj https://youtu.be/G3d8wBOLS2c?is=meGcHQZtpcRFRUsj (The original video is in french but it has an autodubbed english track)

num42 5mo ago

These days YouTube has so much AI generated music, very hard to differentiate from originals. For examples look at these YT channels uploading AI generated music: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6Xw8Jrwf009nHTV165UuQw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6Xw8Jrwf009nHTV165UuQw https://www.youtube.com/@ForeverDisco80s/videos https://www.youtube.com/@ForeverDisco80s/videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQn7ZUixKXg&list=RDMQn7ZUixKXg&start_radio=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQn7ZUixKXg&list=RDMQn7ZUixK... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUph_6i5Pr0&list=RDWUph_6i5Pr0&start_radio=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUph_6i5Pr0&list=RDWUph_6i5P... so on..I think uncountable amount of AI gen stuff is uploaded to YT everyday

unsupp0rted 5mo ago
Yup, a lot of these AI songs are just plain good: https://youtu.be/nwBDmUdX8Io https://youtu.be/nwBDmUdX8Io If you heard these on the radio while working at a grocery store in 1983 you'd be begging your local music store to sell them to you. To me this AI-generated "slop" is much more enjoyable than human-generated slop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPAg7ODubB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPAg7ODubB4 Where "slop" = "what can I put out that I don't love but that people will click on?"
- fallingfrog 5mo ago
  Sorry, but that music is really boring. I certainly would not have bought it in 1983. But, you're right that the average person on the street probably can't tell the difference. Music out there in the real world runs in clusters and communities that form around real world places where people go to be together and make and share things. Its so much more colorful and interesting than you can imagine. But, it is admittedly just a small slice of the weirdest and most creative and crazy people who participate in those communities. For everyone else music is just a recording that appears out of thin air in their car stereo without context and the glossiest product is the one they pick. What do you think of this? https://youtu.be/5KszaGOsFR8?si=YVorLTuTMr7jjAvY https://youtu.be/5KszaGOsFR8?si=YVorLTuTMr7jjAvY Or this? https://youtu.be/pdEmM79MRmU?si=CMGkWs6CyZxXyVaH https://youtu.be/pdEmM79MRmU?si=CMGkWs6CyZxXyVaH Or this? https://youtu.be/Bdzt39vX1Sw?si=06NNB4m0xuB7Lcbl https://youtu.be/Bdzt39vX1Sw?si=06NNB4m0xuB7Lcbl

Akuehne 5mo ago

With the majority of popular music decided by a handful of people in LA, Nashville, or New York, let me ask one question: is this actually a bad thing? Hear me out. Most of what's on the radio could have been made by AI already and no one would've noticed the difference. To be clear, I'm not talking about legitimate artists doing something original or authentic. I'm talking about the execs who find performers to sing and dance over their perfectly manufactured hit single. Songs made by people like Max Martin, who aren't trying to express anything beyond their knowledge of which combination of notes has the highest ROI. No disrespect to Max, he's incredibly talented at what he does. But now the execs have the data, and they don't need the Max Martins, Diane Warrens, or Carole Kings anymore. They can plug in the numbers and out comes a perfect song for their next artist. So let's embrace the new AI pop. Let it dethrone the kings who've shaped the sound of pop culture for too long. Real art always seems to find its fans eventually, and I don't think AI will stop that. Yet. When a model writes a song that lingers the way "Linger" does, maybe it will. But at that point, if the music really is that good, does it matter?

gbanfalvi 5mo ago
> Real art always seems to find its fans eventually, and I don't think AI will stop that. That's what's happening though. Someone is writing a prompt, generating some slop and then directing bots to collect money that will never make it to real artists. If they were getting too small of a slice before, now it's even smaller. > But at that point, if the music really is that good, does it matter? We're very far from "that point". The point we're at right now, which we need to tackle is the one in which we're drowning in slop. I'm not personally against using AI tools to write code or help someone generate music, but right now it just impedes, devalues and deplatforms the real stuff to make money from a system that hasn't caught up.

pixel_popping 5mo ago

I love AI generated music, I think people aren't objectively interested in ranking it and appreciating it enough probably because of the attach to artists behind songs, but in reality, practically speaking, it's getting SOLID.