Music: the fight against bots that steal plays and revenue from artists
Tracks uploaded en masse – sometimes using artificial intelligence – and fake accounts that play them: this is how streaming revenue ends up in the hands of those organising the fraud. Mazza (Fimi) is calling for checks to be carried out on platforms and distributors
“Platforms cannot bury their heads in the sand and pretend nothing is happening, because ultimately this is a phenomenon that affects the entire sector and discredits the platforms themselves.” This is the emergency plan put forward by Enzo Mazza, president of FIMI, the Italian Music Industry Federation: no room for indifference, and a united front bringing together platforms, distributors, chart organisations and the judiciary. Because the enemy that is learning to circumvent the rules of music streaming is not a lone pirate with a computer in their garage, but a criminal industry that has already learnt to use artificial intelligence against the music industry.
The mechanism is simple to describe, though not so easy to uncover. Tracks are uploaded to platforms, sometimes created using artificial intelligence. Fake accounts are set up and bots are used to generate plays. They are, in Mazza’s words, ‘robots listening to robots’. Each artificial play may be worth very little. But if the plays are spread across thousands of tracks and a large number of profiles, the small sums add up to a tidy sum.
The reason this trick works lies entirely in the economic model of streaming. The platforms’ revenues are pooled and distributed according to listening figures. Ultimately, the fake figures take away a share from those who would otherwise be entitled to receive it. ‘Fraud is a bit like a dishonest bank employee who, instead of stealing 200 million from the accounts of the bank’s most important clients, pockets 5–6 euros from each of the bank’s 10,000 or 20,000 clients,’ observes Mazza. The pie remains the same, but the slices are smaller and are also going to those who aren’t entitled to them.
The most striking incidents have occurred ‘in Latin America, particularly in Brazil, and in the United States’, but the nature of the phenomenon is, by definition, global: criminal organisations aim to ‘generate a high number of plays on numerous songs that are distributed globally via the platform’.
The phenomenon, explains FIMI’s president, was discovered almost by chance whilst looking at the charts: ‘At first, the warning signs were unknown tracks appearing in the top 100 charts, but without any recognisable success outside the platforms. Songs that nobody had ever heard of, or artists who were equally unknown.’ The intended victims, Mazza warns, are ‘obviously, first and foremost, the smaller labels and lesser-known artists, who are excluded from the charts and the major streaming services’, crushed by a system that diverts genuine royalties towards phantom catalogues.
