Latest news with #Deezer
Mediapart
5 hours ago
- Mediapart
Iran war: how Macron got caught in an Israeli trap
The cookies and similar technologies we use on Mediapart are of different natures and allow us to pursue different purposes. Some are necessary for the functioning of the site and the mobile application (you cannot refuse them). Others are optional but help to facilitate your experience as a reader and in some way support Mediapart. You can refuse or accept them below, depending on their purpose. Do you agree that Mediapart uses cookies or similar technologies for the following purposes ? You can make your choice, for each category, by enabling or disabling the switch button. Mandatory for the operation of the site or application Subscriber login, anonymized audience measurement, sending of push notifications, tracking of failures, highlighting of our services these tools are necessary to track the activity of our services and their proper functioning. read more Here are the various cookies and similar technologies included in this category : Authentication cookies : subscriber login. : subscriber login. AT Internet : anonymized audience measurement : anonymized audience measurement Display of multimedia editorial content : videos (YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, INA), social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter), documents (Scribd, Document Cloud, Slideshare), sounds (SoundCloud, Spotify, Deezer), maps (Google Maps, Mapbox, CartoDB, uMap), infographics (Highcharts, GitHub, Datawrapper, Flourish, Infogram, ThingLink, jQuery, Google Fonts, Bootstrap), live blogs (24liveblog, CoverItLive), media integration support in Journal and Club publications (Embedly). : videos (YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, INA), social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter), documents (Scribd, Document Cloud, Slideshare), sounds (SoundCloud, Spotify, Deezer), maps (Google Maps, Mapbox, CartoDB, uMap), infographics (Highcharts, GitHub, Datawrapper, Flourish, Infogram, ThingLink, jQuery, Google Fonts, Bootstrap), live blogs (24liveblog, CoverItLive), media integration support in Journal and Club publications (Embedly). Typeform : optional questionnaires to collect readers opinions on our digital products. : optional questionnaires to collect readers opinions on our digital products. Datadog (only on the website) : technical indicators and load balancing. : technical indicators and load balancing. Selligent (only on the website) : communication with the subscriber, highlighting of services, offers and benefits. : communication with the subscriber, highlighting of services, offers and benefits. Batch (only on the app) : sending push notifications and in-app messages. : sending push notifications and in-app messages. Firebase Cloud Messaging (only on app) : required for push notifications to work on Android. : required for push notifications to work on Android. Microsoft App Center (only on app) : app update and failure tracking system. Statistics These tools allow us to collect statistics on site and mobile application traffic to understand usage, detect possible problems and optimize the ergonomics of our products. read more These are the third-party tools included in this category : AT Internet : audience measurement related to subscriber ID. : audience measurement related to subscriber ID. CrazyEggs (only on website) : customer journey analysis. : customer journey analysis. Nonli (only on website) : helps our social network team to publish our contents on social networks. : helps our social network team to publish our contents on social networks. Qiota (available only on the website) : management of the datawall system. Advertising retargeting There is no advertising on Mediapart. But we do promote our content and services on other sites and social networks. For this, we use technologies made available by some advertising companies. read more These are the third-party tools included in this category : Facebook (only on the website) : audience targeting on social networks to promote Mediapart. Content Access Management We use the Qiota service from Opper Marketing Suite to configure the activation of a datawall on certain content (available only on the website). This system, intended for non-subscribed users, requires the input of an email address to access the relevant content. By providing this information, the user consents to its collection, storage, and use for statistical purposes. In accordance with the applicable regulations, users have the right to access, rectify, and delete their data, which they can exercise by contacting dpo@ Save and close
Mediapart
9 hours ago
- Mediapart
Trump slams ‘publicity seeking' Macron over Iran comments
The cookies and similar technologies we use on Mediapart are of different natures and allow us to pursue different purposes. Some are necessary for the functioning of the site and the mobile application (you cannot refuse them). Others are optional but help to facilitate your experience as a reader and in some way support Mediapart. You can refuse or accept them below, depending on their purpose. Do you agree that Mediapart uses cookies or similar technologies for the following purposes ? You can make your choice, for each category, by enabling or disabling the switch button. Mandatory for the operation of the site or application Subscriber login, anonymized audience measurement, sending of push notifications, tracking of failures, highlighting of our services these tools are necessary to track the activity of our services and their proper functioning. read more Here are the various cookies and similar technologies included in this category : Authentication cookies : subscriber login. : subscriber login. AT Internet : anonymized audience measurement : anonymized audience measurement Display of multimedia editorial content : videos (YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, INA), social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter), documents (Scribd, Document Cloud, Slideshare), sounds (SoundCloud, Spotify, Deezer), maps (Google Maps, Mapbox, CartoDB, uMap), infographics (Highcharts, GitHub, Datawrapper, Flourish, Infogram, ThingLink, jQuery, Google Fonts, Bootstrap), live blogs (24liveblog, CoverItLive), media integration support in Journal and Club publications (Embedly). : videos (YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, INA), social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter), documents (Scribd, Document Cloud, Slideshare), sounds (SoundCloud, Spotify, Deezer), maps (Google Maps, Mapbox, CartoDB, uMap), infographics (Highcharts, GitHub, Datawrapper, Flourish, Infogram, ThingLink, jQuery, Google Fonts, Bootstrap), live blogs (24liveblog, CoverItLive), media integration support in Journal and Club publications (Embedly). Typeform : optional questionnaires to collect readers opinions on our digital products. : optional questionnaires to collect readers opinions on our digital products. Datadog (only on the website) : technical indicators and load balancing. : technical indicators and load balancing. Selligent (only on the website) : communication with the subscriber, highlighting of services, offers and benefits. : communication with the subscriber, highlighting of services, offers and benefits. Batch (only on the app) : sending push notifications and in-app messages. : sending push notifications and in-app messages. Firebase Cloud Messaging (only on app) : required for push notifications to work on Android. : required for push notifications to work on Android. Microsoft App Center (only on app) : app update and failure tracking system. Statistics These tools allow us to collect statistics on site and mobile application traffic to understand usage, detect possible problems and optimize the ergonomics of our products. read more These are the third-party tools included in this category : AT Internet : audience measurement related to subscriber ID. : audience measurement related to subscriber ID. CrazyEggs (only on website) : customer journey analysis. : customer journey analysis. Nonli (only on website) : helps our social network team to publish our contents on social networks. : helps our social network team to publish our contents on social networks. Qiota (available only on the website) : management of the datawall system. Advertising retargeting There is no advertising on Mediapart. But we do promote our content and services on other sites and social networks. For this, we use technologies made available by some advertising companies. read more These are the third-party tools included in this category : Facebook (only on the website) : audience targeting on social networks to promote Mediapart. Content Access Management We use the Qiota service from Opper Marketing Suite to configure the activation of a datawall on certain content (available only on the website). This system, intended for non-subscribed users, requires the input of an email address to access the relevant content. By providing this information, the user consents to its collection, storage, and use for statistical purposes. In accordance with the applicable regulations, users have the right to access, rectify, and delete their data, which they can exercise by contacting dpo@ Save and close
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
AI, bot farms and innocent indie victims: how music streaming became a hotbed of fraud and fakery
There is a battle gripping the music business today around the manipulation of streaming services – and innocent indie artists are the collateral damage. Fraudsters are flooding Spotify, Apple Music and the rest with AI-generated tracks, to try and hoover up the royalties generated by people listening to them. These tracks are cheap, quick and easy to make, with Deezer estimating in April that over 20,000 fully AI-created tracks – that's 18% of new tracks – were being ingested into its platform daily, almost double the number in January. The fraudsters often then use bots, AI or humans to endlessly listen to these fake songs and generate revenue, while others are exploiting upload services to get fake songs put on real artists' pages and siphon off royalties that way. Spotify fines the worst offenders and says it puts 'significant engineering resources and research into detecting, mitigating, and removing artificial streaming activity', while Apple Music claims 'less than 1% of all streams are manipulated' on its service. That may sound encouraging, but in a streaming business worth $20.4bn globally (according to the IFPI), it's likely that hundreds of millions of dollars are being skimmed off annually by rogue operators. Part of the problem is that while the barriers of entry for musicians have been dramatically lowered – uploading songs to streaming services is much easier than manufacturing CDs or vinyl – the barriers of entry for fraudsters are lower too. So the industry has declared war, but hair-trigger automated detection systems mean that artists are seeing their music taken offline even when they've done nothing wrong. Darren Owen, chief operating officer of music distribution company Fuga, suggests streaming fraud 'started to blow up across the industry' around 2021. Grappling with it now makes up 50% of his workload. Using AI and machine learning, Fuga gives streaming patterns a 'severity score', separating out 'non-human listening patterns' to spot fraud. 'You're not going to listen to the same song at the same time across multiple devices,' Owen says, noting that countries like India, Vietnam, Thailand and parts of eastern Europe are hotbeds of click-farm activity, using low-paid workers. 'It's become clear that organised criminals are involved in it as well.' It is not just services like in Germany – which was taken offline after a court injunction – and others in Canada and Brazil who are being targeted by record industry trade bodies for offering artificially inflated streams. Universal Music Group (UMG), the biggest record company in the world, has been accused by Drake of conspiring to increase the play count of Kendrick Lamar's diss track Not Like Us, an allegation UMG denies. The Guardian has spoken to multiple artists who found themselves at the sharp end of this war on manipulation, where unexpected spikes in streams get taken as proof of guilt. Darren Hemmings is managing director of music marketing company Motive Unknown and a musician himself. His distributor recently informed him that a track on one EP, having jumped from 'a few plays a day' to more than 1,000, was guilty of manipulation. 'I wouldn't blame them for drawing that conclusion,' he says, but 'it's very judge, jury, executioner'. He did not manipulate the streams, but could not identify the root cause – other than it simply becoming popular with actual listeners. Northern Irish rock band Final Thirteen had some of their music taken off streaming services due to a spike in the tens of thousands. They suspect this came after a play on Radio 1, but their distributor automatically concluded they were manipulated. 'It's really hard for any artist to prove that they didn't [manipulate streams], but it's even harder for Spotify to prove that they did,' says their drummer, Doobes. '[They] take it down and that's it.' Adam J Morgan, who makes music as indie act Naked & Baked, had a track get over 10,000 streams in a week, possibly from use in a TikTok video, but it was zapped by his distributor RouteNote as suspicious. 'I hadn't done anything wrong and they didn't provide any evidence,' he says, believing it was down to an overly anxious RouteNote. 'I spent that weekend trying to work out what was going on, but Spotify said my music hadn't been flagged at all.' RouteNote did not respond to a request for an interview. Takedowns can cause musicians inconvenience, derail marketing and cost them money. Matthew Whiteside, artistic director of experimental classical event The Night With… (and head of the TNW Music label) had three different albums taken down amid claims of artificial streaming. He tracked it back: TNW Music tracks were being added to manipulated playlists. 'It made no sense [why they were added] based on the genre.' His distributor said he could resubmit the album again, at $40 per album, but with no guarantee it would not be removed again. 'Streaming in general is geared against the smaller and the niche,' he says. 'If we get 1,000 streams a month on an album, I'd be very happy.' As such, paying to resubmit an album is beyond their release budget. Deezer claims it was the first streaming service to implement fraud detection systems. 'We look at a lot of indicators that help our algorithm decide if a user is fraudulent or not,' says Thibault Roucou, the company's royalties and reporting director. 'When we ask for a takedown, we look manually at what's happening and we're very confident that it is extreme manipulation.' Unfortunately, systems elsewhere for taking down tracks often presume guilt and the appeals system is so arduous that small acts, already struggling, just give up. Pop singer Levina, who represented Germany at Eurovision in 2017, saw her music taken off streaming services without warning – it was flagged because she unintentionally had the same name as another artist. 'With streaming services, it's almost impossible to [appeal] through them,' she sighs. 'You fill out a form but it leaves you quite powerless.' She is also chair of the artist council within trade body Featured Artists Coalition, and they are finalising 'minimum standards for what distributors should be doing'. She proposes a traffic light warning system that allows acts time to present their defence or take action to address the problems. Streaming services and distributors now accept this battle is about containment rather than total elimination. Owen, however, says the latest iteration is not fraudsters manipulating the streams of a few tracks by large amounts, but rather boosting multiple tracks a small amount to fly under detection radars. For Hemmings, this could result in a two-tier streaming economy, with smaller acts abandoning the main streaming platforms, where earnings are derisory anyway, to focus on a service such as Bandcamp. 'This could provoke a conclusion among large swathes of the independent music community that they're just better off focusing on other ways to make money.'
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Up to 70% of streams of AI-generated music on Deezer are fraudulent, says report
Up to seven out of 10 streams of artificial intelligence-generated music on the Deezer platform are fraudulent, according to the French streaming platform. The company said AI-made music accounts for just 0.5% of streams on the music streaming platform but its analysis shows that fraudsters are behind up to 70% of those streams. AI-generated music is a growing problem on streaming platforms. Fraudsters typically generate revenue on platforms such as Deezer by using bots to 'listen' to AI-generated songs – and take the subsequent royalty payments, which become sizeable once spread across multiple tracks. The tactic aims to evade detection measures triggered by vast listening numbers for a small amount of bogus tracks. Thibault Roucou, the director of royalties and reporting at the Paris-based platform, said the manipulation of AI-generated music was an bid to 'get some money from royalties'. 'As long as there is money [in fraudulent streaming] there will be efforts, unfortunately, to try to get a profit from it,' he said. 'That's why we're investing in fighting it, because we know it's not going away and we need to be one step ahead every time.' Deezer deploys a tool it says can detect 100% AI-made content from the most prolific AI music models such as Suno and Udio. Deezer said the AI-generated music streamed by fraudsters ranged from fake pop and rap music to artificial mood tracks. The platform blocks royalty payments for streams it has identified as fraudulent. Deezer revealed in April that AI-generated music now represents 18% of all uploads to its platform, or 20,000 tracks per day. The company said it was removing all fully AI-generated content from its algorithmic recommendations. Deezer has more than 10 million subscribers worldwide, while market leader Spotify has 268 million. Roucou said he did not know who was behind the fraudulent streams but the perpetrators appeared to be 'organised'. The global streaming market was worth $20.4bn last year, according to trade body the IFPI, representing a sizeable target for fraudsters. In its latest global music report, the IFPI said fraudulent streaming steals money that 'should be going to legitimate artists'. It said generative AI had 'significantly exacerbated' the problem. Last year, a musician in the US, Michael Smith, was charged in connection with a scheme to create hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs and stream them billions of times, obtaining $10m in royalty payments.
The Guardian
13 hours ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Up to 70% of streams of AI-generated music on Deezer are fraudulent, says report
Up to seven out of 10 streams of artificial intelligence-generated music on the Deezer platform are fraudulent, according to the French streaming platform. The company said AI-made music accounts for just 0.5% of streams on the music streaming platform but its analysis shows that fraudsters are behind up to 70% of those streams. AI-generated music is a growing problem on streaming platforms. Fraudsters typically generate revenue on platforms such as Deezer by using bots to 'listen' to AI-generated songs – and take the subsequent royalty payments, which become sizeable once spread across multiple tracks. The tactic aims to evade detection measures triggered by vast listening numbers for a small amount of bogus tracks. Thibault Roucou, the director of royalties and reporting at the Paris-based platform, said the manipulation of AI-generated music was an bid to 'get some money from royalties'. 'As long as there is money [in fraudulent streaming] there will be efforts, unfortunately, to try to get a profit from it,' he said. 'That's why we're investing in fighting it, because we know it's not going away and we need to be one step ahead every time.' Deezer deploys a tool it says can detect 100% AI-made content from the most prolific AI music models such as Suno and Udio. Deezer said the AI-generated music streamed by fraudsters ranged from fake pop and rap music to artificial mood tracks. The platform blocks royalty payments for streams it has identified as fraudulent. Deezer revealed in April that AI-generated music now represents 18% of all uploads to its platform, or 20,000 tracks per day. The company said it was removing all fully AI-generated content from its algorithmic recommendations. Deezer has more than 10 million subscribers worldwide, while market leader Spotify has 268 million. Roucou said he did not know who was behind the fraudulent streams but the perpetrators appeared to be 'organised'. The global streaming market was worth $20.4bn last year, according to trade body the IFPI, representing a sizeable target for fraudsters. In its latest global music report, the IFPI said fraudulent streaming steals money that 'should be going to legitimate artists'. It said generative AI had 'significantly exacerbated' the problem. Last year, a musician in the US, Michael Smith, was charged in connection with a scheme to create hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs and stream them billions of times, obtaining $10m in royalty payments.
