Building an authentic audience for music artists takes time and patience. With the right press and marketing strategy, your music can reach new audiences and fans on a global basis. However, artificial streaming and playlisting are causing significant problems within the music industry, with Spotify now outlining that 'outside Spotify' playlist promotion will lead to strikes and potentially having your song(s) removed.
So why do companies still offer it? Firstly, we need to understand a little more:
What is artificial streaming?
Artificial streaming involves using bots or streaming farms to artificially boost the number of music streams for an artist. These fake streams inflate a musician’s play count on platforms such as Spotify but do not truly reflect genuine user listening intent. As Spotify heavily invests in detecting, preventing, and removing the royalty impact of artificial streams, this can lead to musicians’ accounts being flagged or deleted, and charges to labels and distributors when artificial streaming is detected on their associated accounts.
How does it work?
Most third-party playlist curators charge fees to be included in their playlists, selling playlist positions and periods of times in exchange for a fee. These fees are often take via Paypal 'Family and Friends', meaning there is little recourse for refunds, greater possibility of fraud and it's much harder to trace malicious activities. Charging for a playlist in any way is against Spotify's terms and conditions, and in line with their new guidance and strike warnings, can lead to your songs being removed.
There are tools to analyse the legitimacy of playlists, but they're ineffective. Most tools anaylise how a playlist has grown over time but this can be easily manipulated. Many people ignore the fact that third-party playlist curators routinely change their name and profiles to avoid detection, meaning it's common place for playlisters to have two or more sets of playlists at any one time - a set which they can sell to artists and companies, and a set which they're growing fraudulently over time to fool growth trackers.
The unfortunate reason why playlisting as a service is so popular with companies is because the profit margins for companies is extremely high. The most common price for a spot on a playlist tends to be between $10-$50, whereas the fees you pay to companies are usually beyond $1000 dollars.
What to look out for
Spotify clearly states that they “strictly prohibit using any third party service that promises streams or playlist placement in exchange for money.” As this violates Spotify’s terms and conditions and user guidelines. Not only this, but Spotify now states you cannot purchase an 'outside Spotify' service in relation to playlisting.
What abnormal activity on your music may look like:
- A sudden spike in streams for no apparent reason, followed by a drop off
- An unexplained spike in streams from a location where your tracks haven’t previously been active
- The majority of streams coming from unexplained or surprising sources of streams (such as “Other” or another streaming source that doesn’t make sense)
- A sudden and short-lived increase in follower growth
How to avoid fake playlists
Spotify's new guidance makes your next steps really clear and the best way to avoid fake playlists, strikes or your songs being removed from Spotify is to stop engaging with third-party playlists altogether.
Source: Spotify
