Music Streaming Fraud
More serious than you think
Pretty interesting overview of streaming fraud explained by the guys from Beatdapp. They work with major streaming services to identify and stop illegitimate activity.
The scams are usually accomplished using fake accounts under centralized control, or frequently legitimate accounts that have been hacked and used by the scammers. In other cases, scammers will siphon real streams off of popular artists by using stolen music.
What surprised me, but maybe shouldn’t have, is that music distributors (some of them anyway) have no incentive to reduce fraud, because they are profiting from it.
My takeaway from the video - the 4 major categories of streaming fraud:
Low quality music streamed by botnets. This is often AI generated, or just very low-effort productions using royalty-free samples. If you hear music on Spotify that just doesn’t sound like music, it was probably made to facilitate this type of scam. Nobody’s really listening to it so it’s a waste of bandwidth. But the fraudsters get paid if they can evade detection
Music stolen from legitimate artists. Scammers can upload unreleased material that’s been leaked or hacked, or create sound-alike version, and then get real people (and fake accounts) to stream these tracks. Often they do this in a particular geographic area when an artist is on tour.
Artists scammed by shady marketing companies. A lot of shady marketing companies promise new artists “real streams” in exchange for cash, but they pocket your money, and then stream your music with botnets. They may merely be middlemen out to make a buck, but either way fake streams can hurt an artist by being flagged as fraudulent. That reduces their future reach.
Artists/labels deliberately pumping stream numbers. Some people deliberately and knowingly engage bot services for their music. Or, they will ask their fans to stream their new album on repeat all day long. This doesn’t usually help and will likely hurt as described above.
Incidentally, I recently had my own Spotify account disabled for “suspicious activity”. There was no notice, I just couldn’t log in, and didn’t get an explanation until I emailed their support. And I definitely wasn’t botting - the only thing I can think of is that I was listening to random tracks from Forgotify. I’m guessing they deemed that suspicious for a new account.