Introduction
If you’re releasing music at any level, you’re probably aware that Spotify and other streaming services and distributors regularly remove music (and don’t pay artists) due to ‘fake streaming’. Sometimes this is very cut and dry, and sometimes you’ll see artists complaining that the removal was unjust, and they’ve done nothing wrong. We thought we’d highlight all the different ways this can happen, and what to do (and not do) to ensure you ‘stay clean’, so your music isn’t removed.
So, what is a fake stream?
The simplest way of looking at it, is anything that’s not genuine. Playling your own music on repeat 24-7 for example is the simplest form of this – you might make the best music in the world, but if Spotify detect one user listening to the same things over and over to excess, they’ll see that as manipulation. This also includes asking other people to do the same thing for you.
Bots/botting is the most common source of fake streams – where someone has a computer usually in a data centre, repeatedly streaming songs on repeat.
Fake/manipulated playlists are also very common, which uses botting but against playlists rather than individual songs or releases.
The ‘giveaway’ to Spotify and other services, is usually the listener/plays ratio. If a song has say 30 streams per listener per day, that will look obviously suspicious and manipulated. You can see the overall ratio for songs and releases in Spotify For Artists, but Spotify can also see this on a per user basis. With botting, another giveaway is random towns/cities appearing in the list of locations with high streaming numbers – usually these are places where Amazon or other companies have servers which people are using to send botted streams.
How do I ‘stay safe’?
Of course, don’t directly pay for botted streams – but also, be very careful when paying for any sort of promo service. You’re basically not allowed to pay for guaranteed streams, or pay for placements on a playlist. You can pay for things like meta ads that point to your song/release, that’s fine – but be wary of paying others to do this for you, especially if it seems really cheap, as they may be using bots instead of real ads. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. It’s also fine to pay for playlist ‘consideration’, using services such as SubmitHub, where you can submit using credits/money to get your music in front of validated, genuine playlist owners to see if they like your track and will add it to their playlist(s).
SubmitHub also have a playlist checker, if you see your song is getting a lot of streams from a playlist and you don’t know where it’s come from, you can check if the playlist is botted, and if it is, report it to Spotify and request removal from it using this link.
Summary
As a rule, all of the services you will see constantly bombarding you with ads on Instagram & Fiverr, and other platforms, that guarantee x amount of streams for x small amount of money, will invariably be using bots and could result in getting your music removed. There is no cheap shortcut to getting your music heard. These things are always tempting, but they are not worth it – focus instead on organic growth through your own promotional efforts & playlisting, or if you’re signed to a label, follow their guidance.
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