French music platform Deezer has launched a free web-based tool that scans your music playlists across different streaming services and tells you how much of that music is generated by AI.
The company says its recognition tool uses the same technology it relies on internally to identify and label hundreds of thousands of AI-generated music tracks. The tool works with playlists from about 20 music services, including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Tidal, SoundCloud and Pandora. You can also direct the tool to a specific uploaded file or URL. It can scan up to 100 playlists at a time.
Music service Deezer has taken its in-house AI music discovery tool public with a free service that scans music playlists across 20 services.
AI music is controversial. Although it seems inevitable that more and more musicians will use technology, many listeners have a negative reaction to the idea of music not created by humans. Meanwhile, music companies like UMG they are trying to protect their artists from fake AIs while betting on deals that allow AI remixing of their catalog on platforms like TikTok.
Elsewhere in the music industry, i The Grammy Awards have decided (at least for now) that only human artists are eligible for the coveted award after one AI-powered artist, Ghostwriter, asked to be considered for the award in 2023. Billboard allows AI-generated music on its charts, but music retailer Bandcamp does not on its service.
Deezer’s AI-detection tool could give music fans a way to see if AI-generated music has overtaken tracks in their libraries. It works whether you have an existing Deezer account or not. And because nothing is ever truly free, the tool absorbs your playlists from Deezer and offers to create a new account for you if you don’t have one.
How Deezer’s device fared in our (very limited) testing.
In my limited testing of the tool, a scan of my Spotify playlist found 0% AI content. That number was incorrect, as I added several albums from AI songwriter and comedian Nick Harrison, aka “The Professor.”
A representative for Deezer suggested that some artists who are not yet on Deezer may not be seen.
“Through our policy and approach to AI music (finding, tagging and excluding from recommendations), we have noticed that some AI music is not automatically uploaded to Deezer,” a representative said in an email.
But Harrison’s albums are on the platform, as a representative later confirmed. It’s possible that because I have Harrison’s music in my library as albums, not as individual tracks in my playlist, his music was not found by the AI.
As a next step to make sure the tool works, I added some of Harrison’s songs to my existing playlist. The representative also suggested adding a few well-known AI artists to the playlist, such as Velvet Sundown. Doing so seemed to work; My AI detection score went from zero to 1%.
My take: Unless your playlists rely heavily on new music selected by recommendation algorithms instead of your own configuration, you probably won’t see many tracks marked as AI-generated by Deezer’s tool. However, as AI-generated music continues to grow and labels struggle to keep up, this can still be a useful benchmarking tool if you’re unsure whether what you’re hearing on a streaming service is real or AI-generated.
At least for now.
