What is Artificial Streaming and How To Avoid It

In our ongoing effort to fight Artificial Streaming, Revelator shares with clients the monthly Artificial Streaming reports provided by various DSPs. These reports include all the data needed to monitor Artificial Streaming, take preventive actions to minimize this issue, and hopefully eliminate it.

Causes of artificial streaming

The streaming services work diligently to ensure streams reflect genuine user listening intent. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. Artificial Streaming can result from any of the following causes:

1. Fraudulent behavior (when someone is trying to increase their stream count and/or obtain more royalties).
2. Naively using a seemingly legitimate marketing/playlisting service that, in fact, uses unauthorized methods to generate streams.
3. Being placed on a fraudulent playlist without your consent. Fraudsters services will often do this in order to convince artists that they can increase their streams.
4. “Ricochet” Artificial Streaming when fraudsters play random tracks in order to appear like normal users. In such cases, you or your client are not the instigators of the Artificial Streaming, but random victims.
5. Fans seeking to increase the popularity or financial gains of an artist.

Consequences of artificial streaming & why it is harmful

Regardless of the cause of your reported Artificial Streaming, the result is the same in all cases:

• The DSP will withhold royalties for all such Artificial Streams.
• The streaming counts for related tracks will not be incremented for any Artificial Streams.
• The related tracks will be blacklisted from all official playlists.
• Damage your recommendations (by associating you with completely unrelated artists appearing on the same Artificial Streaming playlist).
• The track and/or artist may be demoted from all recommendation algorithms (an equivalent of shadow-banning on social media).
• Provide misleading data about your actual audience and hurt your credibility within the industry.
• Waste of money that could instead have been spent on legitimate promotional efforts.
• The DSP may take down the associated release(s) from their service; in the case of Apple, Pandora, and sometimes Spotify, this is a permanent takedown.

What to do if you receive a report for artificial streams in your account

• First, identify all artists with an Artificial Streaming count above 100 (per track) and let them know of the consequences and penalties for Artificial Streaming (see the section above). Tracks with 100 or fewer reported Artificial Streams are most likely victims of causes #3, #4, and #5 above. But also pay attention to any 1 release or account (Client)having multiple such tracks, as this may also indicate illegitimate action. Keeping a low Artificial Streaming count across multiple tracks is a known technique used by fraudsters & illegitimate services to avoid detection while ensuring a significant amount of Artificial Streams.
  • For cases where a release or account receives less than 100 Artificial Streams, you can safely ignore it and consider it as inevitable "noise" (causes #3, #4 and #5 above).
• Secondly, send all these artists the 4 educational links below and tell them that:
  • If they're using a marketing service guaranteeing streams, it is most likely fraudulent and they should ask this service to stop their campaign immediately. The longer the campaign runs, the more likely they are to incur fines and ruin their ranking in recommendations.
  • If they're running an ad campaign (for example, Spotify or Facebook ads), they should gather proof of these campaigns (screenshots, links, etc.) and send you these in order to file an appeal with the DSP.
  • (Spotify only) If your artist notices they are receiving a lot of streams from a playlist that seems suspect, have them report it to Spotify using this form. Such playlists will likely have some/all of the following characteristics:
    • Hundreds of tracks of very disparate genres
    • Very few saves
    • Some greyed out/unavailable tracks
    • Most of the artists will be unknown, with very few Monthly Listeners
    • A creator who has created a lot of other playlists with the above characteristics
  • Educational links:
    • Video: What is artificial streaming?
    • Article: What is artificial streaming?
    • Article: Learn more about services that guarantee streams
    • Article: How artificial streaming ruins an artist's recommendations and discovery
• If you suspect that your artist/client is a bad actor, we further encourage you to take down their entire catalog and terminate their account.
• In cases of significantly high Artificial Streaming, we will notify you and may issue a takedown of the related assets in order to prevent additional Artificial Streaming. In such cases, please do not redeliver the related releases until you have confirmed that the cause of the Artificial Streaming has been addressed and confirmed with us that you can redeliver the related releases.
• Whatever you do, do not simply ignore these Artificial Streaming reports! Continually receiving a significant amount of Artificial Streaming can result in Revelator terminating your entire account

Related articles

• Understanding and using the Artificial Streaming dashboard
• Appeals policy for assets flagged as violative by Revelator