Sony Music steps up fight against streaming fraud

Sony Music is stepping up its fight against streaming fraud as it contends with a surge in AI-generated songs impersonating artists from Harry Styles to Adele.

The music group told the FT that it had asked platforms to take down more than 260,000 tracks by the end of September, almost double the 135,000 it had sought to remove by the end of March.

Sony said the problem of “generative AI deepfake tracks that imitate our artists’ voices and likenesses without permission” was “happening at scale, harms artists, misleads fans and undermines the ethical use of AI”.

The deepfakes, which target current and historic acts such as Britney Spears, Queen and Michael Jackson, are part of a broader fraud problem confronting the music industry.

Streaming services are also being flooded with tracks generated in bulk by AI solely for bots to play repeatedly, generating royalties for their owners that diminish the pot of cash available for legitimate artists.

Dennis Kooker, president of Sony Music’s Global Digital Business, said this year that fraudulent streams could account for as much as 10 per cent of tracks across music streaming sites.

Label executives estimate that streaming fraud could be costing the industry as much as $2.2bn a year.

“We will keep enforcing our artists’ rights and expect platforms to act quickly and to prevent the same content from reappearing,” Sony added. “But it’s becoming an uphill struggle.”

French streaming service Deezer said this summer that an average of 90,000 AI-generated songs were being uploaded to its platform every day, accounting for more than half of new music. It also found that up to 85 per cent of streams of fully AI-generated tracks last year were fraudulent.

A recent report by Sonic Intelligence Academy said 92.8 per cent of all AI tracks submitted to its registry had been created using music-generating platform Suno, while DistroKid had been used to distribute more than three-quarters of submitted AI songs.

“AI streaming fraud is fast becoming an epidemic for the music industry, and the exponential growth should alarm everyone,” said Jamie Njoku-Goodwin, a music rights campaigner and former head of strategy to Rishi Sunak when he was UK prime minister. “Whether it’s in deepfakes, streaming farms or AI slop being generated and distributed in bulk, organised fraudsters appear to be using platforms like Suno and DistroKid to rip off artists.”

Sony and its peer Universal Music are pursuing legal action against AI music companies such as Suno, which they accuse of copying recordings without a licence to build models that run its music-generation service.

A Suno spokesperson said that the labels’ claims were “fundamentally flawed on both the facts and the law”.