Universal Music declined to provide attributable comment.

Streambait spammers have long infested streaming platforms: Deezer estimates that 7% of its streams are fraudulent. These scams use various subterfuges. They may involve downloads with optimized search names such as “Relaxing music therapy” or “Relaxation, sound therapy”. Sometimes these are songs just long enough, 31 seconds, to trigger royalty payments. Other times, scammers will upload 10,000 versions of the same song, each with a different artist name. As generative AI becomes more accessible and sophisticated, spamming platforms will only become easier.

Streams labeled as “noise” made up around 2% of streams on Deezer. The company hasn’t shared exact numbers, but white noise and other non-musical content “dramatically” dilute professional artists’ royalties, Folgueira says. And we have numbers on how this mess affects the biggest streamers: Spotify found that removing white noise would increase its annual gross profit by $38 million.

Under the new model, Deezer promises to separate professional artists from the musical clutter of amateurs, functional music and system game robots, and future-proof its platform.

“The new model is designed to effectively stop gaming behaviors using white noise,” explains Folgueira. “It will also provide us with a framework to continue to develop tools to combat future abuse, including, for example, fraud and copyright infringement using AI-generated content.”

This agreement should benefit professional artists. Deezer claims they should see payments increase by 10 percent. “I think ultimately this model will probably end up benefiting most of the artists you know or care about,” says David Turner, founder of music industry newsletter Penny Fractions and head of strategy at SoundCloud. Ultimately, he says, amateurs will lose out on earnings worth less than a cup of coffee, while an artist with a small but devoted following might now be able to pay the rent.

This is not without its problems, however. On the one hand, the framing pits amateurs against artists, Pelly argues, implying that amateurs are the reason “real” artists don’t earn more.

“There are so many artists who cannot make a professional living from recorded music, in part due to the injustice of the streaming system, or who intentionally choose to make music in a deprofessionalized way for personal or artistic reasons “, she said. “These systems are also incredibly unfair to these types of artists.”