Streaming platforms are paying exorbitant sums of money to bad actors, claims research from Beatdapp, who revealed that roughly 10% of all music streams are fraudulent.
That’s according to a recent report from Sky News, which illuminated troubling figures from the music data tracking company. As it stands, all the money from subscriptions is placed into a large pool used to pay out artists per stream. This model has reportedly been exploited by scammers, whose methodology typically involves uploading a song and then implementing bots to stream it en masse before collecting royalties on the artificial plays.
That fraudulent activity has resulted in up to $3 billion in revenue each year, per Beatdapp. The firm has now joined forces with Beatport with the hopes of amplifying their fraud detection technology to make sure on-platform streams are authentic.
The merits for the company are crystal-clear—by detecting fraud, they won’t be wasting money paying for inauthentic content. However, Beatport’s charts open the door to benefits for non-artist users on the platform. With the elimination of fraudulent streams, Beatport’s chart rankings will give users a better idea of who’s organically trending in the industry through a “fair and transparent environment” devoid of the influence of pay-to-win bots.
Helen Sartory, Beatport’s Chief Revenue Officer, acknowledged that fraud is less of a problem on their platform as opposed to Spotify or Apple Music, but doubled down on these benefits.
“We launched streaming products under the Beatport and Beatsource brands in 2019, and despite the fact that they have not historically been a target for streaming fraud, suspicious activity has been on the rise in recent months,” Sartory said in a statement. “Although our fraud rates still remain half that of the industry average, we rely on accurate streaming data not only to preserve fair compensation to artists and labels, but also for track recommendations and analytics. We are excited to be able to work with Beatdapp to ensure that our data is representative of authentic listener engagement.”
You can learn more about Beatdapp’s fraud detection technology here.
