The Pop Corporation

There’s clearly a scam afoot which needs addressing – streaming platforms are making money from A.I. music with inflated streaming numbers from bots. If the audience is removed, and platforms benefit from programs generating income for themselves, then that’s a con, right?

We wrote about the AI group who had amassed millions of listens, but can we be sure that the listeners are genuine? Of course, streaming services have said that they’re doing something about bots inflating the stats for songs, but new technology means new problems we haven’t yet fixed.

Take for example, Deezer, who have said that up to 7out of 10 streams of artificial intelligence-generated music on their platform are in fact, fraudulent. Now, in total, the number of fraudulent streams is quite small, making up for 0.5% ‘listens’, but when it comes to AI music, up to 70% of streams are from bot programs.

As AI-generated music becomes more sophisticated, and more prevalent, it is clear there’s a problem that needs fixing. We’re looking at a situation where there’s no-one making the music and there’s no-one listening to it either, and it’s all just using a lot of resources, an environmental disaster, and musicians are getting shafted for a service that, if we’re not careful, ends up eating itself.

Of course, while the music business reacts quite slowly and hopes regulators come to the aid of them, these fraudulent activities are moving quickly, and skimming royalty money away from real people while they avoid being detected.

Thibault Roucou, the director of royalties at Deezer has said: “As long as there is money [in fraudulent streaming] there will be efforts, unfortunately, to try to get a profit from it. That’s why we’re investing in fighting it, because we know it’s not going away and we need to be one step ahead every time.”

Deezer has said that they block payments for anything they identify as fraudulent. However, earlier in the year, they reported that AI music now represented 18% of all uploads, which is somewhere in the region of 20,000 tracks per day.

You can imagine for a larger platform like Spotify, that number is even larger and more unmanageable.

Getting paid for music is hard enough at the best of times for working musicians – AI is only exacerbating the problem. We’re even seeing AI tracks appearing on dead artists Spotify pages fraudulently, most recently with murdered country singer Blaze Foley, with AI slop track ‘Together’ appearing on his profile, complete with AI generated artwork.

Spotify have since removed the track for “violating our Deceptive Content policy”, but given that music streaming as business is worth over $20bn, it is likely that fraudulent streaming is skimming off hundreds of millions away from actual people. The amount of work put into combating this fraud is taking away resources from, say, nurturing new talent, improving conditions for new music and editorial wings which can amplify independent artists.

And getting caught in the friendly fire are independent musicians who have surprise hits. Spotify for example, won’t make payments on any song that has under 1,000 plays, so if someone has an unexpected hit, amassing a lot of genuine plays out of nowhere, Spotify’s systems can flag them as fraudulent.

This was the problem faced by Irish group Final Thirteen who had an explosion of plays after being featured on Radio 1, where programs determined that their plays must have been manipulated, leaving the group with the unenviable task of having to prove that they weren’t. And streaming services are either uninterested in proof to the contrary, or not sufficiently staffed to deal with it, leaving musicians in a penniless limbo.