You’re busy and your reading time is limited. You likely read trade press, some consumer press, local news in your market(s) and browse social media. My reading list is a little different and runs to publications like The Financial Times. Last Wednesday, it ran an article that made me go “Are you serious?” The headline was “French Music Streamer Deezer Battles Deluge of AI Fraud.”
You already know that it’s not hard to create music with AI. AI programs like Suno and Google’s Lyria 3 and their ilk can create songs in a hurry. The FT reports that scam artists are creating music using AI, uploading it to sites like Deezer, and then listening to it. The system uses bots to run up the number of plays. Deezer then sends the scammers a check for the plays.
You also know that unless your name is Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, or someone in that category of superstar, you don’t get rich from streaming. However, if you upload a lot of AI songs to a streamer and create enough “listens,” there is some real money in the activity.
The sub-headline in the FT Deezer story was “Industry under threat from fraudsters uploading and repeatedly playing tracks created by AI to extract royalties.” Deezer’s CEO, Alexis Lanternier, said that the perpetrators create plays that can game the company’s algorithms that select songs for legitimate Deezer subscribers. As Lanternier put it, fraudsters “manage to get a few euros or dollars (per song) and then, by the end of the month, they make real money.”
How Prevalent is AI Fraud?
Here’s the amazing part: Deezer’s system detected 13 million (!) AI tracks last year. The company said over 60,000 AI tracks are uploaded to the platform every day, which is 39% of the total uploaded tracks. For me, two things stand out: the first is 60,000 AI tracks per day. And if you back out the 39% number, over 90,000 legitimate human-created tracks are uploaded to Deezer every day. Can you imagine over 600,000 new songs performed by humans being uploaded to the Deezer platform each week? Everyone wants to be a star.
If you don’t know about Deezer, it’s a competitor to Spotify, Apple Music, and all the other streamers. Based in Paris, the service is big in France and Brazil, is available in over 180 countries, and offers a “white label” service as well. Here’s another fun fact: Deezer announced a profit of €9 million for 2025, the first profit since the company was founded in 2007.
Spotify has been accused of using AI music in its service. It’s not clear if the company is doing that today, but if you were betting — I mean trading on Kalshi or Polymarket — you would likely place a few dollars on “yes.”
Perhaps Jimmy Iovine, the music industry legend, got it right when he said on a recent podcast that “the streaming services, to me, are minutes away from being obsolete.” His reasoning is that artists want to communicate with their fans. And you can’t do that through a streaming service. Or, at least per Iovine, the streaming services don’t want that. They want to hang on to listeners’ data and use it for their purposes.
The Fix?
Where does music radio fit into this situation? While we’ve seen some AI creeping into the radio industry, it’s been on the presentation side with AI talent. Remember AI Ashley in Portland, Oregon? Joel Denver’s Sonictrek.ai is offering formats that have AI talent, along with websites that offer the opportunity to chat with an AI “person” who knows more about what’s going on in music than any human. However, the music remains the music — created, written, and performed by real human beings. Is it really that different when the choice is no jock, a voice-tracked jock, or an AI jock? If the music is real, I’m not sure.
Maybe music radio needs to be more vocal about what’s going on in streaming. Music on the radio is real, and there are gatekeepers to ensure it stays that way. Some might say we shouldn’t bring attention to a competitor. I remember when XM and Sirius first launched and some radio operators were adamant about not accepting ads for the services. This was before the two merged. Why promote the competition?
How many radio listeners don’t already know about Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, etc.? A pretty small number. But if we point out that radio doesn’t use algorithms and leaves music creation to humans, even if the talent isn’t a live human, the totality might best be summed up in a Led Zeppelin song title: “What Is and What Should Never Be.”
Let’s meet again next week.
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