Morgan Hayduk, co-founder/co-CEO of Beatdapp, a company that builds software to detect and mitigate fraud, told Billboard earlier this year that one under-discussed aspect of fraud was the “collateral damage” caused. We’re also working with industry-leading fraud detection companies to improve our systems as we scale.”Įven so, anyone’s music can be targeted with bots on a streaming platform. And then we have an investigative process that our team will go through to decide if they need to hold the revenue or contact a DSP. We have systems that alert us if we think something might be suspicious. We have much stricter policies, frankly, than many other distributors. (The fraudulent plays identified in those reports were caught, which means they did not impact payouts.) A Spotify spokesperson noted in a statement that the platform “consistently removes products designed to game the system in order to generate royalties.”Īlex Mitchell, Boomy’s CEO, said in an interview with Billboard this week that “our review team spends a huge amount of time on that issue. Last year, Deezer said that the company detects suspicious activity on 45,000 accounts a day, and Spotify sends regular reports to major rights holders about the level of fraud detected on their catalogs. This is the day-to-day reality of the modern music ecosystem. Last month, Umeadi Onyekwelu, music licensing lead at the African streaming service Mdundo, wrote that “looking at the music industry in Nigeria, one of the biggest problems is stream farming, which has become more widespread and prominent over the years.”ġB French Streams Were Fake in 2021, Report Finds: 'Fraud Seems to Be Getting Easier' But this is changing: Leaders at SoundCloud, Pandora and Napster all spoke about their efforts to fight fraud on their respective platforms at a Music Biz conference panel in 2022.
Talking publicly about streaming fraud was once viewed as “airing dirty secrets,” one executive told Billboard recently. For comparison’s sake, a Deezer executive said last year that “7% of the volume of daily streams is now detected as fraudulent.” Merlin, which handles digital licensing for many prominent independent labels and distributors, briefly had fraud levels near 10% (from music on the ad-supported tier of Spotify) in 2020. As Christine Barnum, chief revenue officer at the distributor CD Baby, recently told Billboard, “nobody’s immune” to this type of fraud.īoomy says roughly 7% of the music it had on Spotify was pulled down because those songs were targeted with bot activity in April after a short pause, Boomy users were able to resume uploading new songs to Spotify as of May 5. But combatting streaming fraud is a never-ending game of whac-a-mole that takes place, to varying degrees, across all streamers and all distributors, and focusing on any single mole can obscure the larger context. These episodes show the challenge of accurately reporting on the murky world of streaming fraud, where even the most basic information - how many tracks were impacted, what criteria were used to determine they were manipulated and how it compares to overall fraud levels - is often kept out of reach by tech companies. (Spotify has consistently said over the years that “stream manipulation is an industry-wide issue that” it treats “very seriously.”) The whole incident now seems to be less about any one company, and more like a natural part of streaming services’ ongoing efforts to prevent fraud from impacting payouts on their platforms.
And then it turned out that Spotify had pulled down more music - that had nothing to do with Boomy, or AI - due to evidence of manipulation as part of a routine sweep a few days later.
Then the narrative changed: Spotify said the “anomalous activity” was related to streaming fraud, not the fact that Boomy’s tools rely on artificial intelligence. The Boomy post was measured, the response less so: The company’s statement was initially viewed as confirmation that AI was causing more trouble amid a wave of anti-AI sentiment in the music industry. On May 1, Boomy, a music-tech company that allows users to create songs with help from artificial intelligence tools, posted to its Discord that new uploads were paused and “certain catalog releases” had been pulled from Spotify due to “potentially anomalous activity.” More than two years later, a variation of this episode played out again. Why Can’t Music Fix Its Fake Streams Problem?
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