Why do people buying fake streams?

It is not new information that fake streams are becoming common in the music industry. Although strictly illegal, there are companies that choose to buy fake streams on the behalf of artists to artificially boost their numbers. The legal and goodwill consequences for such an action are harsh and permanent.

The music industry, especially the social media platforms for this industry, is completely stats-driven. A stream that gets millions of views or likes is automatically famous. Today’s technology is favoring many black hat hackers to steal original music from artists and sell it to music companies or use it as click-farms. They can easily sell those illegal streams and originals to legitimate companies, who end up taking part in an illegitimate business transaction that would put their career and company on stake.

How to stop a hacker from stealing your music streams and monetizing it? As a music company, how can you weed out the illegal ones? Here is how Spotify can help.

Spotify’s new algorithm

Spotify’s algorithm and manual reviews can now identify any fraudulent stream. This process’s primary purpose is to remove all fake accounts and use metrics to filter them as a continuous process.

Spotify automatically removes streams it identifies as ‘artificial’ / ‘fraudulent’

Since January 2020, Spotify automatically removes streams it identifies as ‘artificial’ / ‘fraudulent’ on the ad-supported tier, from its royalty calculation and usage reports. Spotify also continues to monitor for this activity on the premium tier and similarly removes streams it identifies as artificial and excludes these from royalty and usage reporting in line with its existing process.

Protect your music business

As an artist, you can safeguard your music from hackers and allow listeners and music companies to approach you. As a music company, you are legally liable for using fake streams, even if you did not intentionally buy one. The music platform is a buyer-beware market. Such an action would put your entire career and growth into ashes.

Labels should always avoid services that guarantee streams or playlist placement. Their illegitimate practices could result in your music being removed from Spotify. It’s important to know you’re putting your career at risk any time you engage with one of these bad actors.

The best way to avoid such mishaps is by choosing reliable online music distributors like Beatrising Distribution. Beatrising takes all protective measures to identify and avoid fraudulent streaming by any of the labels, sub-labels, and artists. As a member, you can rest assured that your music and career is safe with Beatrising.

Image by Digital Photo and Design DigiPD.com from Pixabay