The French company says it wants to “weed out illegal and fraudulent content” to protect artists. There has been a recent spate of songs that use artificial intelligence to replicate the vocals of real stars.
In April, Universal Music successfully petitioned streaming services to remove a song called Heart On My Sleeve, which was purportedly sung by two of the company’s biggest artists, Drake and The Weeknd.
The label said “the training of generative AI using our artists’ music” was “a violation of copyright law”. However, that position has not been tested in court, and remains a legal grey area.
Musicians themselves are divided over the technology. Alt-pop singer Grimes has made her voice available for anyone to use, but Sting said artists were facing “a battle” to retain authorship over music.
Deezer has a small share of the UK streaming market, but is more prominent in France and part of South America. It says its new tool will tag music that has been created with generative AI, “starting with songs using synthetic voices of existing artists”. Those tracks will be flagged up to labels, artists and other rights holders, who can then decide what action to take.
AI music can be cheap to create and royalty-free, which would increase profits for streaming services.
Very few tracks are currently being uploaded with so-called “deepfake” vocals, but there may be an explosion of AI music in the next six to nine months. With more than 100,000 songs uploaded to the service per day, it is impossible to have the content checked by humans.
That’ll put the cat amongst the pigeons … 
