Audio Processing for Detecting Piracy on TikTok

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As the case with most new tech, music streaming services like YouTube and Spotify paved the way for cool new problems in the industry.

While media platforms lower the barrier of entry for small artists, they also allow free users to pirate songs and profit off of them as if they were original. YouTube and its most profitable partners, including major music labels, have discovered that only AI solutions can keep up with the sheer scale of online piracy. Unfortunately, not all platforms have caught up to this realization, and not all artists are protected to the extent of those under major labels.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that we have a serious piracy problem on social media, particularly on TikTok. By allowing users to mislabel songs as original, TikTok fails in its attempt to promote artists and instead reinforces “The Great Divide” in the music industry.

Despite the massive growth of streaming revenue, artists continue to be shortchanged in their individualized earnings.

Let’s get into some more specific data to see why I’m so fired up about this.

How TikTok Encourages Piracy

I found this dataset on Kaggle which we’ll use as our reference point for an average TikTok feed. If you take a look, you’ll see that most of the audio clips are outdated. (Admittedly, I’m totally unaware of…