Unveiling the Pitfalls of Fake Streaming in the Music Industry : A Useful Notice to Musicians and Wiseband Users
For more than a decade, music streaming has revolutionized the way we consume music, making it more accessible and paving the way for new artists’ career. Streaming services like Spotify have become the go-to for music enthusiasts, offering a vast catalog with the convenience of a single user account.
For emerging artists, this means a straightforward path to reach a global audience through digital distributors like Wiseband.
However, with the rise of this new way of listening to music, comes the darker side of the industry: the world of Fake Streaming.
Understanding Fake Streaming
In simple terms, Fake Streaming is a fraudulent manipulation of online listens, which artificially increases the number of streams or views, either through automated bots or human actions. The main intention is to generate more royalties, enhance a track’s performance in charts, or influence recommendation systems.
Streaming platforms and distribution companies like Wisebnd tend to identify different types of manipulations on streaming statistics and highlights associated risks.
Why Fake Streaming is Wrong: Drawbacks & Negative Impacts
It’s crucial to emphasize that purchasing streams or engaging in fake streaming is illegal. The repercussions extend beyond the individual artist, impacting the entire music ecosystem. Fake streaming distorts statistics, misleads users, and, as research indicates, does not alter the revenue share retained by platforms like Spotify. To better understand what does it means, here are some key findings :
- A significant increase in streams without a proportional rise in paying subscribers leads to a decrease in the value of a stream, impacting the earnings of rights holders, which leads to the “Ripple Effect”: legitimate artists find their share of revenue reduced due to a shared-royalty pot with fraudulent artists, who hold-up a great amount of royalties thank to their fraudulent activity.
- Consumer trust in the music market declines due to concerns about chart reliability, recommendation system relevance, and platform security.
- Fraudulent streams disrupt artist profiles, weaken engagement rates, and reduce an artist’s recommendation capability.
- Professionals in the industry express a lack of trust in artist performance on platforms, leading to a broader mistrust among stakeholders.
According to the CNM’s Artificial streaming manipulation study, the share of Fake streams on Spotify, Deezer and Qobuz in France in 2021, are estimated between 1% and 3% (which represents between 1 and 3 billion streams detected as fraudulent).
Wiseband’s Proactive Approach
Wiseband supports you, THE ARTIST. As your biggest fan, we are committed to ensure that non-violating artists are not impacted by sweeping artificial streaming penalties now being imposed in the music streaming industry. Hardworking artists using supported and accepted promotional practices should not be penalized by artificial streaming policies and bad actors, when they, themselves, are not involved in these practices.
Unfortunately, as we saw in the last paragraph, artificial streaming does occur and it has serious and damaging consequences for Wiseband, its customers, and the streaming platforms. Some platforms have made policy changes to bring further attention to this issue. Specifically, in a new policy change, Spotify has begun to penalize and impose fines on music distributors like us in cases where they find our clients have been involved in artificial streaming activity.
That’s why, in our commitment to quality along with digital platforms, Wiseband integrates a rigorous detection process to identify potentially fraudulent products.
Indeed, through years of experience, Wiseband has developed key criteria to detect products susceptible to artificial streaming. Products identified as such are in breach of distribution conditions, exposing users to severe consequences:
- Removal of music from platforms
- Non-payment of generated incomes
- Deletion of the user’s account with Wiseband.
Be Aware: Don’t Put Your Music At Risk
Third parties that promise playlist placements or a specific number of streams in exchange for compensation are likely using illegitimate practices without your knowledge. These services can threaten your hard work, resulting in the potential withholding of streams or royalties, or even complete removal of your catalog from streaming services.
Our streaming partners work diligently to ensure streams are legitimate, meaning they reflect genuine user listening intent. If a service/digital platform finds that you (or a third party hired by you or on your behalf) have boosted play counts through any automated, deceptive, fraudulent or other invalid means (digital bots, “click farms”, payment for placement on playlists, etc.), the service/digital platform may permanently remove your entire catalog.
Using services in violation of the platform’s terms and conditions will ultimately result in your Wiseband account being closed, your royalties withheld, and a ban from further use of our services.
If you’re in the market for a music promotion service, make sure to do your research before you hire them. Wiseband offers promotional services for artists that are compliant with streaming platforms and build real organic growth for your music.
For additional advice on this, Spotify offers some informative articles, and we recommend you read them here:
https://artists.spotify.com/help/article/third-party-services-that-guarantee-streams
Promotion and Advertising Done Right
Rather than succumbing to the temptation of fake streaming, artists can take genuine and legal steps to promote their projects. Here are some tips:
- Create a high-quality musical project
- Establish and animate social network and YouTube pages
- Always claim your Artist pages on digital platforms, and customized them
- Upload songs well in advance, preparing for digital releases and playlist integration
- Request a pre-save Wisepage and share it widely
- Space out releases to maximize exposure
Wiseband is committed to assisting independent musical projects in reaching their audience. In addition to playlist pitching for high-potential releases, we offer targeted promotion and marketing solutions on various platforms for your project.
For further details, visit our website!
Note: Wiseband advises against engaging in artificial streaming practices to maintain the integrity of the music industry and safeguard the interests of all stakeholders.