AI-Generated Songs Spur the Rise of Streaming Farms

The Music Industry Fights Back Against The Sophisticated Approaches of Artificial Streaming Use by Criminals

Lately, the streaming zone has been a key spot for criminals to target and cause streaming fraud. Fraudsters have been using armies of bots and have simultaneously formed streaming farms to artificially inflate streaming numbers. They divert billions of dollars from the finite royalty pool–funds that are supposed to go to artists, labels, publishers, music creators–and instead place it in their personal bank accounts.

Music streaming platforms dispense the royalties based on the play counts of songs, but with the system manipulated, criminals can easily dismantle this entire system for business models countrywide.

With the exploding rise of AI technology, criminals can now use AI song generators to flood streaming platforms with millions of fake songs and stream one only a few thousand times to generate royalties without suspicion. As estimated by Deezer, eighteen percent of the content uploaded to its own platform each day is AI-generated. Criminals can remain under the radar while still operating with highly lucrative amounts as a guaranteed reward.

BeatDapp, a service that tracks missing royalties and identifies streaming fraud, has risen to take a stand against the phenomenon. Morgan Hayduk, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of BeatDapp, tells WIPO Magazine, “Every point of market share is worth a couple hundred million US dollars today. So we’re talking about a billion dollars minimum–that’s a billion dollars being taken out of a finite pool of royalties and everyone in the value chain losing out on a material amount of revenue on an annual basis.”

Each time a song’s play count is manipulated, it turns the platform’s recommendation algorithm upside down and makes it increasingly difficult for an artist to get their music acknowledged. Everything is affected–from planning tours to scheduling promotional campaigns. All due to the distortion of consumer data that these criminals are affecting.

“[Streaming fraud] is impacting artists you’ve never heard of because we don’t have a chance to bring them to market,” David Sandler, Warner Music Group’s Vice President of Global Content Protection says. “Our company invests a tremendous amount of money, time, and energy in discovering new artists, signing new artists and developing their careers. Every dollar we spend to fight fraud is a dollar we can’t spend discovering new artists.”

From the policing side, IFPI’s Melissa Morgia claims that many necessary mechanisms are already in place, and the challenge lies in helping local authorities familiarize themselves with legal issues and facilitating any communication between jurisdictions and stakeholders where the fraud networks are operating. “The legal tools to take action globally are there,” Morgia says. “It’s just a matter of implementation.”