MBW Reacts is a series of analytical commentaries from Music Business Worldwide written in response to major recent entertainment events or news stories. Only MBW+ subscribers have unlimited access to these articles. The below article originally appeared in Tim Ingham’s latest MBW+ Review email, issued exclusively to MBW+ subscribers last week.
So. What are we going to do about it?
MBW reported Thursday (September 11) on some startling new statistics from French streaming service Deezer.
Important: Deezer might be a relative minnow in global streaming terms, but its catalog-ingestion patterns broadly reflect the rest of the DSP world.
Deezer said that its service is now absorbing over 30,000 new, fully-AI-made music tracks per day.
That volume accounts for 28% of the total uploads reaching the service every 24 hours.
Think on this: The 28% stat is up from 10% in January, and 18% in April.
Sorry to shriek, textually speaking, but I’m going to put this next bit in red, because someone has to.
At that rate of growth, fully-AI-made tracks will account for more than 50% of all new music hitting streaming services by the time the 2026 World Cup swings around.
So.
What are we going to do about it?
One place we can start is by refusing to swallow the nonsense.
The tech utopian argument on this topic always comes back to… let the customer decide.
Examples:
- If someone loves a 100% AI-generated track, what’s wrong with that? Why should human-made pop music automatically get elevated beyond machine-made audio?
- Also, how dare the music industry tell a tone-deaf logistics manager, expressing himself with a few clicks of a mouse on Suno, that he’s not a ‘real musician’? Haven’t your oh-so-human A&Rs and producers gotten hooked on autotune and machine-learned trickery in the studio for the past decade? Chasing half-interested and bot-driven streams to win a race of your own making?
Fair points.
But what’s this?
“Deezer has found that up to 70% of the streams generated by fully AI-generated tracks are in fact fraudulent.”
Ah. So now we know: the primary motivation for consumption of this Suno/Udio-made ‘slop’ isn’t, in fact, because it’s great.
Nor is it out of respect for an innovative new form of creative expression.
It’s because there’s a racket to be exploited.
It’s because of that most human thing: greed.
Deezer’s 70% fraud stat shows the lie to a claim from Suno’s VC investor, Lightspeed Partners, that the platform is making music “more inclusive, creative, and rewarding for everyone involved”.
More rewarding?!
Try telling that to the artist having her streaming royalties sucked away by bot-made, bot-consumed, audible tripe.
To Deezer’s credit, once its platform detects this kind of fraudulent activity, it blocks those streams from its royalty pool. The service also blocks 100% AI tracks from algorithmic recommendations and editorial playlists.
Are other music services being as vigilant? Perhaps not.
Remember that Amazon recently integrated Suno directly into Alexa, two months (!) after publicly stating that Amazon Music would “address unlawful AI-generated content”.
Wild. Like opening a liquor store outside Alcoholics Anonymous.
So. What are we going to do?
Let’s start at the start.
This isn’t about debating the creative merits of robot symphonies. It’s about wiping out a new, and rapidly escalating, form of fraud.
A good start would be cross-platform tech collaboration on anti-fraud activity, coupled with a strict set of industry anti-fraud standards at DSPs.
Beyond that, harsher financial punishments for those distributors pushing torrents of AI slop onto DSPs while promising not to do so.
Especially when that AI slop is then being rinsed by bot-farms.
Happily for those clinging on to hope for humanity… there was some good news buried in Deezer’s latest data: human listeners, real listeners, are largely rejecting AI-made music.
Deezer says that despite those 30,000 daily AI uploads, just 0.5% of streams on its platform today are of fully-AI tracks.
Omit the 70% of those streams that have been deemed fraudulent, and it means just one in every 700 plays on the service are of robot-made music.
It obviously helps that Deezer blocks fully-AI tracks from its editorial and algorithmic playlists/recommendations.
But let’s not coddle ourselves into thinking there isn’t a giant problem brewing.
In plain terms: There are now 10 million+ fully-AI tracks hitting music streaming services each year. And Deezer’s stats suggest nearly three-quarters of the plays of these tracks are from bot farms.
While we debate whether AI tunes have ‘artistic value’ (and while major record companies simultaneously sue, and negotiate with, Suno/Udio), industrial-scale fraudsters are attempting to systematically loot music’s core machinery.
Lightspeed Partners claimed last year: “Suno is shifting the world of music towards one in which more and more people can express their creativity through music.”
According to Deezer’s data, its output is also shifting the economics of music further and further into the arms of sharks, grifters, and thieves.
Music Business Worldwide
