Deezer has published a fascinating study of the attitudes of music consumers to AI-generated music. And the results are both worrying and reassuring, in equal measures.
The worrying part is that in a blind listening test, 97% of people simply couldn't tell the difference between fully AI-generated and human-made music. When confronted with their results, 71% of respondents said they were surprised and over half (52%) said that not being able to tell the difference made them feel uncomfortable.
More reassuring, though, are general attitudes towards fully AI music. Two-thirds of music streaming users (66%) said that they would listen to fully AI-generated music at least once out of curiosity, meaning that a third don’t want to have anything to do with it at all. Almost half (45%) would like to filter out 100% AI-generated music from their streaming platform.
There is also an overwhelming majority in favour of transparency – 80% of respondents agree that fully AI-generated music should be clearly labelled. Over half (52%) feel that AI-generated songs should not be included in the charts alongside human songs. There is also a majority (58%) who say that streaming platforms should not recommend fully AI-generated music.
Interestingly, music consumers seem to be backing artists. 65% think that their copyrighted material should not be allowed to train AI models and 73% believe it is unethical for AI firms to use copyrighted material to generate new music without the artist’s consent – a clear rejection of the ‘move fast and break stuff’ policy of the tech giants.
The survey was drawn from a fairly large sample – 9,000 adults were interviewed online in October across eight different countries: the US, UK, France, Brazil, Canada, Netherlands, Germany and Japan.
Compared to certain other streaming platforms, Deezer has taken a fairly hard line on AI ‘slop’. In June, they became the first platform to tag AI-generated content. In a statement about the survey, the firm’s CEO, Alexis Lanternier said: “Deezer has been leading the way in creating solutions for transparency and minimising the negative impact of fully AI-generated content flooding music streaming. The survey results clearly show that people care about music and want to know if they’re listening to AI or human-made tracks or not.”
“There’s also no doubt that there are concerns about how AI-generated music will affect the livelihood of artists, music creation and that AI companies shouldn’t be allowed to train their models on copyrighted material. It’s reassuring to see that we have broad support for our efforts.”
Anyway, to have a look at the results of the whole study go to the Deezer newsroom here.
