Deezer Licenses AI Music Detection Technology to Sacem, Ready to Expand to Industry

Deezer CEO, Alexis Lanternier (photo: x @BusinessHonor1)

JAKARTA - The French music streaming platform, Deezer, has licensed its artificial intelligence (AI) based music detection technology to the French royalty management agency, Sacem. This is considered an important commercial deal to combat digital music fraud.

The deal announced Thursday, January 29, is Deezer's first step in commercializing AI detection technology, as the company seeks to drive wider adoption in the global music industry.

The rapid development of AI capabilities is considered to be blurring the boundaries between human and machine-generated musical works. This condition has created a new form of streaming fraud, where perpetrators upload thousands of AI-generated songs to trigger algorithm recommendations and divert royalties from original musicians and songwriters.

Deezer states that by 2025 it has managed to identify and remove up to 85 percent of AI music streams that are fraudulent from the total royalty fund. The company also noted that it had marked more than 13.4 million AI-based music tracks.

Currently, Deezer receives around 60,000 AI-generated songs every day, or around 39 percent of the total daily uploads. This figure has jumped sharply compared to January last year which was still in the range of 10 percent.

Deezer CEO, Alexis Lanternier, said the platform's royalty funds came from around 70 percent of paid customer revenue.

Deezer's AI detection technology works by analyzing audio signals to find distinctive patterns produced by AI music generators such as Suno and Udio. This system is able to detect anomalies that the human ear cannot hear. Deezer says its technology has been trained using 94 million songs and has been filed for two patents in 2024.

However, the Swedish royalty management association, Stim, assessed that detection tools alone are not enough to solve the problem of copyright and music composition in the AI era.

"We believe that copyright and technology can go hand in hand," said Stim. The agency in 2025 launched a license that allows AI companies to legally use copyrighted songs to train their models, provided full transparency over training data.

According to Stim, license obligations and data openness are important steps to prevent fraud from the source.

Meanwhile, Deezer revealed that it was exploring licensing partnerships with a number of collective agencies in Europe and plans to discuss with music organizations in Los Angeles during Grammy Week in the near future.