DeepSeek Is A Wake-up Call For The Music Industry And Its Data Goldmine

"AI is a looming existential threat to the music industry." -Virginie Berger

DeepSeek dropped its V3 model, DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-R1-Zero on 26 December, alongside its paper explaining their breakthrough technology, and I spent my Christmas break playing with it. Yes, really.

Then, on 20 January, DeepSeek launched its DeepSeek-R1-Distill models: a low-cost, local and open-source Large Language Model (LLM). Since then, two other models have been launched, KIMI 1.5 and Qwen 2.5 VL, all agentic multimodal models from China.

China’s top AI model isn’t even DeepSeek; it has at least ten top-tier models trained from scratch, surpassing Europe’s best (sorry, Mistral). The US, meanwhile, has just five major players: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI.

I’ve been using DeepSeek for over a month now, and it’s both awe-inspiring and mildly terrifying. I even brought it up during my AI licensing panel at the recent Music Ally Connect Conference because, let’s be honest, it’s a looming existential threat to the music industry.

This is precisely what I warned about in my December Forbes article on AI’s impending storm for 2025 and again in my latest piece on AI geopolitics and copyright erosion. Spoiler: this is it, the storm has arrived.

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