A Flood of Synthetic Music Reshapes Streaming Economics
Deezer’s decision this week to commercialise its AI music detection technology signals a major shift in how the streaming economy is governed. What began as an internal safeguard has now become something much larger: a foundational system designed to protect royalties, reduce fraud, and restore trust in an ecosystem increasingly flooded with synthetic content.
The scale of the challenge is striking. In 2025, Deezer identified more than 13.4 million AI-generated tracks on its platform. Today, roughly 60,000 AI-made songs are uploaded daily, representing close to 40 percent of all submissions. Even more concerning, 85 percent of streams tied to those tracks were fraudulent, driven by bots inflating play counts and siphoning royalties away from human creators. Without reliable detection, streaming payouts risk becoming a volume-driven free-for-all rather than a system that rewards creativity.
How Deezer’s Detection Technology Works
To address this, Deezer has built a detection system that reportedly achieves 99.8 percent overall accuracy, with full identification of music generated by major AI platforms such as Suno and Udio. The technology combines two approaches: provenance-based detection, which analyzes metadata, watermarks, and distribution pathways, and forensic audio analysis that examines spectrograms and structural irregularities within songs.
This distinction allows platforms to differentiate between human-created, AI-assisted, and fully synthetic music—an essential capability if royalties are to be distributed fairly. Without those categories, platforms cannot reliably determine which streams represent legitimate creative work and which are the product of automated manipulation.
From Streaming Platform to Industry Infrastructure
By commercialising the tool, Deezer is stepping beyond its role as a single streaming service. The move positions the company as an infrastructure provider, often compared to YouTube’s Content ID system for copyright enforcement. Media outlets such as Billboard already rely on Deezer’s detection technology to assess whether charting tracks are AI-generated, and industry analysts expect broader adoption across the sector.
Research using the SONICS dataset—covering more than 97,000 songs—suggests why detection remains possible, at least for now. While AI music can sound convincing in short clips, it often struggles to maintain long-range musical structure across full compositions, a weakness detection systems can exploit.
Why Detection Has Become Non-Negotiable
As generative tools improve, detection will only grow more complex—but also more necessary. Deezer’s CTO framed the goal clearly as “giving the industry tools to make informed decisions,” emphasizing classification over prohibition. In the generative era, transparency has become the foundation for fairness.
Just as anti-piracy tools became essential during the rise of digital music, AI detection is now core infrastructure. Deezer’s move marks the moment the industry collectively acknowledged that protecting royalties, credibility, and creative labor depends on knowing what—and who—is behind the music.
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