Discussion
Deezer says 44% of songs uploaded to its platform daily are AI-generated
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.
ambicapter: Is it free to upload these files? Maybe a 1¢ fee would be enough to kill a majority of the spam.
hombre_fatal: What does human verification look like when you grant that it’s impossible to tell?
devindotcom: I don't grant it. if you mean it is impossible to tell from the music itself, perhaps. but there are other means of verification.
hombre_fatal: What are any examples of how you can verify a song wasn't AI-generated?
captainkrtek: Do any of the major streaming platforms have a stance against AI generated music?
saaaaaam: 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/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?
chromacity: 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.
harrall: 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.
somewhatgoated: A human can still upload tons of AI generated music though?I don’t see how verifying that the author is a human helps in any way.I also don’t think it’s a big problem but that’s another discussion
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.
Kye: 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: 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.
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.
cleversomething: 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.
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.
Forgeties79: 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: 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.
ctoth: If... If you're pulling from something called a feed ... Are you really surprised to get slop in it?
Kye: You're thinking of a feed trough, like for pigs. This use of feed comes from news services.
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.
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.
somewhatgoated: Who is listening to that crap anyway when you got literal decades worth of great music to choose from?
wartywhoa23: Well, even if you are absolutely deliberate against AI slop like me, you might well just fall asleep listening to an ambient album of your top rated human musician, and wake up to AI slop anyway in an hour or two in which your subscription money had been paying those fuckers' instant ramen.But this is easily cured by turning autoplay off, though.
Insanity: I discovered a new band some weeks ago (Hexxenmind) through Spotify. Really liked them, then checked concert dates only to find out it’s AI generated.Honestly couldn’t tell in the moment but now that I know it’s generated it somehow feels “cheaper” and I dislike listening to them.
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...
CharlesW: > …it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever encounter them naturally…"Extremely unlikely", you say? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/13/ai-music-...
mjr00: This is the very definition of unnaturally: the creators of those AI songs spent a ton of money promoting them, for whatever reason.
saaaaaam: 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: really? there are ways of putting music on Spotify that don't involve paying a fee upfront at any time?
saaaaaam: Yes, lots.
CharlesW: If that were true, then I agree that, "it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever encounter them naturally unless the creators spent a ton of money promoting them" would be true. But if you're on MusicTok or using any other popular music discovery channels today, you are encountering at least some AI-created music naturally even if you don't realize it.
wartywhoa23: You're not wasting your time, my friend. But you've got to be very certain and honest as to why you want to learn that.If your goal is being heard and appreciated, well, you better reconsider.If you're doing it for your own pleasure and pure love of art, absolutely do go on, without any expectations. It may or may not take off, but the samurai must not care.
dukeofdoom: I can see this being useful for solo game devs
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".
TyrunDemeg101: I 100% agree with this and have found it to entirely be my own drive for learning and creating.For me it is beyond trying to make money or become famous, it is simply to enjoy the journey and the creativity that comes with creating music.
TheMagicHorsey: Butlerian Jihad vibes are building.
devindotcom: music can be performed live and in person. many musicians work with other musicians, labels, studios etc. a web of trust can be built and verification via performance is a compelling option. not complete but it's certainly an option.would you as a label sign an artist you'd never seen perform? maybe there is value in a platform working under similar constraints.
devindotcom: >But that doesn't sound like something I'd want imposed on all music on a platform.that's fine. there's room for multiple platforms. personally I would pay for the thing I describe, sounds like you wouldn't. but the question is not whether you or i would, but whether enough people would to make it a viable business - whether it's the platform, or the method, or a label that licenses its music in a certain way, or what.
CharlesW: "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.
woolion: I've had my digital art flagged a few times for various reasons (automatic copyright infringement and NSFW filters) -- so this is nothing new (in particular the artwork blocked the upload for some artist songs). So it's nothing new... the only thing is to have a reasonable appeal process. In all cases we got an automated approval after appeal, but it can put an untimely delay.Honestly I hope that the AI filter would be much better in terms of false positive than the aforementioned one, if only because it should be easier via statistical methods.
strangegecko: > For me it is beyond trying to make money or become famous,To clarify, when I speak of "approval", I'm not imagining a successful career or financial success. It's much more basic, i.e. having a few people tell me they genuinely like something I created would do that.> it is simply to enjoy the journey and the creativity that comes with creating music.It's unfortunately not simple for me (again, context of long term burnout / depression etc). If I only go by enjoyment, I will watch TV and maybe read and go on bike rides until the end of my days. But that is not fulfilling in the long term. I have a creative drive, but it's rather intermittent and not enough to consistently want to do the work involved. I'm trying to nurture it.
StilesCrisis: Uh, have you tried rhythm games?You can scratch the same music-exploration itch with a much lower time commitment and get the same thrill of accomplishment as you improve. There is also a built-in crowd of other players at any skill level that you can share your achievements with.It's not the same glassy-eyed state as you'd get with normal video games, TV, or doom scrolling at all. You will need to focus and clear the mind.
kaiokendev: There are still several avenues for this, and I imagine they'll continue to exist even in a mostly-AI-enhanced world. You'll need to dedicate time to finding them.For example, Battle of the Bits [0] is a community all about chiptune music. I'm sure you _could_ use AI to help you learn and produce some things, but the community is mostly about sharing ideas about what works at the electronic level, so even if AI became super capable, it wouldn't help you engage with the community in any meaningful way. There are several such communities across different domains and I imagine they aren't going anywhere anytime soon, regardless of how much improvement happens w.r.t. AI, since the focus is on "what you learned" and not so much "what you did".Similarly, I have seen communities focused entirely on Silicon Graphics workstations, or pc-98 internals. Human passion-based communities aren't going anywhere, Google just makes it incredibly hard to find them outside of word-of-mouth.[0] https://battleofthebits.com
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.
junon: > Part of my reason for trying this was reading how creative endeavors can be therapeutic (I'm dealing with burnout/depression/cptsd).This is the reason why a lot of us make music. Writing orchestral pieces is my own meditation. I don't share most of them, and replacing them with AI would defeat the purpose.Please keep learning it! The world needs more musicians, even if we never hear them.
