My song got botted without my consent and now I have a strike

[Renegade226]

My song was added to a botted playlist without my consent and the streams spiked into several thousands for a few days. I immediately contacted Spotify to report this and the advisor in chat said "everything seems ok, and there's nothing we can do, we cannot remove private playlists from our service"...then 3 months later Spotify issues a strike against my account for fake streams from that same song I tried to report.

Does anyone else have experience with this? And did they get the wrongful strike removed?

[SingSongs21]

You're so right! Since my last post here on this forum a couple of months ago, this has happened 2 times again. First song from June (a really good song, that was well received by many) suddenly lost 2000 listeners. Just now a new song only one week old which last night had 949 listeners, now this morning has been reduced to 152! I have stopped writing mails to Spotify, because it's hopeless. I don't know if it's robots or real persons I am writing to. The replies are the same! Artificial streaming they say. I have never paid for anything like that. The more serious part of this is that big recognized artists do not lose streams/listeners. Oh no! they are so big, let them keep thousands and hundred thousands of listeners. How can new talents ever get a chance to be big, if this happens all the time?

[SingSongs21]

I could not believe this when I checked Spotify for Artist today to see my score. My new song from 1 August, has now been reduced in numbers of streams from 743 to only 61! The first time this happened to this song was a month ago when 797 streams were removed. I am now sick and tired of this. I have tried to contact Spotify, but it seems like they don't really care or bother, because I am only a small new artist/composer trying to make it. Instead they should turn their attention to the artists that have several hundreds of thousands or millions of streams! I bet that there is some fake streaming going there! I don't know if it is robots/AI or real people that reduce my streams. But seen from my point of view as an artist/songwriter it is discouraging. 

[bburman]

Just happened to me too and I'm furious. There was only one song that had a weird spike for a few days, but I had nothing to do with it. A month later the whole album was removed. Apparently it was flagged by Spotify but CD Baby removed it, and wrote that there's no possibiliuty of recourse or reinstating it, and they might even charge fines and take it out of any meagre profits. The system stinks to high heaven. I'm paying a distributor that removes my music without even asking me about it? This malpractice is apparently quite widespread and unlessd you're Sting with a team of lawyers you can't do anything about it. They're happy to take your money and then screw you when someone else misuses your music. 

[HunterK]

Sorry I have been dealing with this for a long time now. I had an entire album removed that had been on Spotify since 2006 because one of the songs on it had been botted. Then I finally get it reinstated and bam 2 weeks later they did it again. Then they moved on to other songs and have done it three more times since that. I think I caught one of them. He was harrassing me on X trying to sell me "Promotion" and I told him no thanks. He didn't want to give up, so I began ignoring him and then finally blocked hm when he start screaming at me asking why I was ignoring him and demanding I answer him. Then guess what..... Botted again. I reported all this to CDBaby and Spotify and praying they don't punish me again.   CDbaby promised they would note all of this, but didn't stop them last time. I also got fined twice. They took all my money I had earned in royalties from other sites and we all know how long it takes for it to add up and I also run a homeless cat shelter out of pocket and that could  have fed a lot of cats. I felt like crying it was so depressing and you feel so helpless.

People are writing a lot of blogs and doing vlogs and Redditt is lighting up with horror stories too. It is so widespread now