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.
So I finally got to check my balance on my distribution account and by good fortune there wasn´t any penalty fee waiting for me.
But a wooping 4 dollar and 30 cents sitting there just ready to be cashed in…!
this topic is so mad. Same happens to me with a track distributed by the orchard. I didn´t got any information from the orchard about the so called “artificial streaming”. They just put the penalty fee of 10 EUR on the invoice.
So I send a request to the orchard about the penalty and ask they to explain it. They basically said, that this track was part of a playlist that got streamed by bots. It was my fault, that I didn´t checked my spotify for artists app and reported that playlist to spotify or the orchard in time. And indeed that track had 1000 streams in August but in other months just 1 - 3 streams a month.
But here is the thing:
I did not know that playlist before
I did not put that track on that playlist
I did not buy / pay for streaming promotion
How do I know if this is a fake playlist or a real playlist for real people?
I do not code bots to “listen to music”
So there are two sides.:
I agree that the stream count is removed from the track and you will not get paid the 0.003 EUR per stream for the bot streams. That is totally fine for me.
But on the other side, why I do get charged with a penalty fee?? I didn´t do anything wrong. It was not my playlist nor did I put that track on that playlist. It somebody others fault.
So why is the technology of spotify not good enough to protect the artists work instead of charging fraud streaming penalties? To quote email conversation: “Yes it´s not fair. But if we want to have the music on spotify we just have to accept this terms. We can´t do anything about it.”.
Not sure if this practice by spotify is legal or confirm with the law. It looks like another way of money making by spotify. And this is underlined by the fact, that if a track got flagged, why spotify provides NONE information about that case in the spotify for artists apps? Spotify can and should provide this information so that artists can comunicate with spotify directly and are able to take aktion.
