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Comments (230)

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  strangegecko
  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.
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  jasongrishkoff
  I've been working hard at this over at SubmitHub, developing a way to detect AI songs: https://www.submithub.com/ai-song-checkerThese 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.
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  advisedwang
  > 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the companyThis 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.
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  milesvp
  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
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  ymolodtsov
  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.
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  01100011
  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.
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  Sol-
  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.
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  nottorp
  So we'll be going back to publishers as curators. Good for the publishers, I guess.
• KnuthIsGod
  "97% of participants couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and human-made music."
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  jagged-chisel
  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.
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  ashleyn
  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".
• nitwit005
  > 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.
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  input_sh
  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.
• tgsovlerkhgsel
  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.
• Keyframe
  Youtube got hit by massive downfall in quality by this as well. It's absurd.
• jjfoooo4
  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.
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  AbraKdabra
  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.
• wenbin
  Similar stats for podcasts - https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-stats/#growth
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  SwellJoe
  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.
• curvaturearth
  Great reason to steer clear of deezer
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  devindotcom
  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.
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  mjr00
  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...
• jnwatson
  Does Deezer charge per song?Sounds like a free backup service to me.
• us321
  Deez what?
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  dukeofdoom
  I can see this being useful for solo game devs
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  captainkrtek
  Do any of the major streaming platforms have a stance against AI generated music?
• iainctduncan
  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.
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  cdrnsf
  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.
• anticorporate
  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.
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  palmotea
  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.
• oliwarner
  ... 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.
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  TheMagicHorsey
  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.
• AlexandrB
  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.
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