Streaming Services Need to Build a Better Ecosystem for Artists to Avoid Fraudsters (Guest Column)

Charlie Kaplan is the streaming service Audiomack‘s VP of product. Variety welcomes responsible commentary — reach out to music@variety.com if interested.

Streaming is the dominant way artists reach listeners in many countries globally, but recent numbers show well over 100,000 songs are uploaded to streaming services daily. As many have said, the challenge for artists is cutting through the noise.

Some streaming services promise playback boosts in exchange for even smaller royalty rates; some dangle artist-facing features behind expensive subscriptions; and some offer avenues for consideration on official playlists. But spaces are limited and often may rely on popularity as a signal for admittance — a chicken-and-egg problem.

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To get plays, enterprising individuals set up stream farms, giant networks of physical devices that programmatically play whatever music they’re told to. They look almost exactly how you imagine: tons of cheap phones wired to a central computer. In the most honest case, stream farms advertise in search results and on social media and, for a fee, drive plays to the music artists select. In more-sordid cases, farms take the money and run without delivering the promised goods. In still more cases, these hustlers upload music themselves, driving plays until their gains exceed the cost of the unsuspecting streaming subscription and pocket the profit in a circular scheme that, in one recent case, made a Danish man almost $300k in a week (and was then sentenced to 18 months in jail). Any cursory search on Google, TikTok, or elsewhere yields a surfeit of advice and instructional videos guiding aspirants to start operations of their own.

Artists paying for streams often have no idea they’re coming from bots, leaving them with a glitzy number on their profile but none of the real fans they’d intended to reach. Those artists may not know the streams they paid for were from illegitimate channels, or worse, are left with a hard lesson and no new plays at all. The stream farmers juicing plays to reap profit for themselves aren’t just skimming cash from billion- and trillion-dollar companies: They are actually diluting the pool of money that should be returned to real artists, and their impact is enormous — nearly 10% of all streams are estimated to be fake, according to a Financial Times report. That’s 10% of all streaming revenue not returned to real artists.

Streaming services are aware of the issue and are organizing to combat it. Detecting fraud is difficult but possible: Farms leave unusual footprints that are detectible to data scientists in the form of weird spikes, improbable numbers of repeats, very short completion rates (streaming services pay artists after 30 seconds of playback), unlikely play ratios between listeners and songs, as well as identifiable networks of coordinating devices. 

Many streaming services have responded punitively by threatening to withhold revenue from distributors who don’t remove such content (which has motivated action) and serving lifetime bans to perpetrators. But innocent artists can get caught in their dragnet even if they haven’t paid for streams: recently tales have emerged from artists whose whole catalogs—and livelihoods—they assert have been arbitrarily and erroneously wiped, without recourse or recompense for the crime of having been involuntarily and unknowingly put on a playlist with music that streaming services deemed sketchy.

Streaming services have given some outlet for fans to connect with fans. Spotify launched Marquee, which lets qualified artists gain attention through a display unit. SoundCloud launched First Fans, which seeds new uploads to fans who have signed up for their $99/year Next Pro subscription. Audiomack recently launched Sponsored Songs, which lets artists pay as little as a dollar to be placed among listeners’ algorithmic recommendations. Ventures like these let artists expand their reach to listeners, avoid bad actors by providing official channels, protect distributors by reducing the risk of fines, reduce streaming services’ need to police plays and protect the royalty pool. 

But even these solutions raise new questions: If streaming services are introducing paid boosts for music, what happens to artists who don’t shell out? How long will today’s standard payouts survive if more artists accept lower royalty rates? Is this a trade from con artistry to clientelism?

Streaming services must make safe avenues for artists to reach fans. Similarly, artists must protect themselves from predatory actors who see strivers as marks. Many methods to build an online audience are well-worn shoe leather: Build a real following, tell friends, play shows, make lots of social media content, and, if you can, get management and a booking agent. Try official tools from streaming services, but don’t use stream farms; you’ll get iced.

The onus can’t only fall on artists. They will only thrive in honest ecosystems. Music has often been described as a dirty business, and this is because so many perverse actors see openings to exploit the pure drive and passion of artists and listeners. As my colleague Brian Zisook, Audiomack Co-Founder, says, they prey on “dream fulfillment.” But in a system that works, artists and listeners safely seek the same thing: Listeners find the music they love, and artists find listeners who love their music. Streaming services should be unshakably called to protect the relationship between the two, who, like celestial objects, act upon one another with greater force the closer together they’re drawn.