A few months ago, I got an email from my distributor saying that one of my tracks had been identified as having ‘artificial streams’ by Spotify. They didn’t even tell me which release it was, and took weeks to respond to my queries, but in the end… the whole album was pulled from the platform - and I was hit with a penalty fee.
The whole process was incredibly shoddy, and when I started loking into it, it seemed like this was happening to lots of independent artists, with no transparency, and no clear route of appeal.
However… I happen to be a lawyer IRL, and I am also incredibly stubborn, so for the last few months I’ve been pursuing this; sending off GDPR DSAR requests, and looking over the contractual wording.
It was in the CD Baby Artist Agreement that I came upon something very interesting indeed. A dispute resolution mechanism that gives artists a potentially very strong way to fight back against unfair practices. So… I’ve put together a video outlining the clause. This isn’t legal advice. Just my experience. But maybe it’ll be useful to some of you.
Update: I woke up to an email from CD Baby Legal today. The long and short is that they’ve cancelled the ‘artificial streaming’ fee, applied a credit, and highlighted some… interesting things about the way these reports actually work. Will put together a follow up with all the details shortly.
Yes. Not enough, but they are crediting my account with the 50USD I asked for. If I’d been forced to send the arbitration notice via post that would have increased significantly, so it was smart to resolve it before then!
The only real solution is not to distribute your music to Spotify at all. They control the levers of this BS ‘artificial streaming’ system, and there is no way to protect yourself other than to opt-out. They don’t deserve your time, energy, or work. I would stick with places like Tidal, Apple etc who don’t have the same arbitrary penalties, and which actually pay (albeit little) for streaming - as well as BandCamp etc. Fuck Spotify.
I’ve had the same experience with Spotify and Distrokid, though I didn’t get a penalty fee.
They claimed that there where artificial streaming for tracks on a newly released record and they where banning the tracks.
I asked distrokid to document the problem or show proof of the fraud and I got nothing from them.
(I was properly just communicating with a bot)
Every track on my record was under the 1000 streams so I did not expecting a payout from Spotify at all and I was very conflicted about being on Spotify in the first place.
Since I wasn’t slapped with a fee, I just took my music down from Spotify and never looked back.
It might be worth checking your finances on Distrokid, as the fee took a few months to be applied to my account, and I didn’t get a separate notification. If I hadn’t gone through it carefully I wouldn’t have noticed.
