Stop Playlist Scams

[ASouthworth]

There is a widespread Spotify playlist scam that has been running for at least a year, and i've seen it result in artists getting their music pulled from the platform when they've done nothing wrong. 

Basically the scam is a playlist company will add songs by 2,000 artists per day to their playlist, pumps bots to all the songs on it (maybe even some followers) hoping the artist will see the spike in streams and check it out in Spotify for Artists. The playlist has contact information or a website link on it, and they're hoping someone falls for it and hires them for more fake promo.

The playlist company is adding songs without the artists permission, and sometimes artists get banned even though they never initiated this.

Here are some ideas for how Spotify can fix this problem:

1. Make it impossible to put URL's or email addresses in the playlist descriptions
2. Provide some option for artists to report the playlists and have their songs removed from the playlist
3. Create better detection algorithms that punish the playlist creator and not the artists on the playlists
4. Switch to a user centric payment model that makes bots non-viable
5. Impose limits on the Spotify API that make it costly for bad actors to scale these types of bot attacks

[revenBand]

I woke up this morning to an email saying my new single was live and then I received 4 emails saying my old music has been removed due to artificial streaming.
This is madness. I've only used Distrokids services and have never paid for any 3rd party anything.
I contacted Spotify and they said yeah you have artificial streams contact Distrokid.
I haven't heard anything from Distrokid yet.
Today was meant to be exciting. Instead I'm having a full blown panic attack.
I am so upset.

[JoseCorteReal]

This is a security issue, Spotify should take down every
suspicious Playlists, with thousands of listeners and plays overnight. If
Spotify can see that one of your songs are growing too fast as they also
can see the suspicious playlist action. First Spotify should take down the
playlist and warn you about that they suspect that you are using external
services to boost your plays.
It's easy to Spotify, with all their Data experts they have, to keep the
surveillance over your music and see that it happens again... Then yes, if
it happens again, Spotify should take your song down. Fair enough. Not
being judged without proven reasons. Just guessing is what is happening now.

This ping pong between Spotify and distribution is just a
Financial/Economics engineering. is a Cartel action.
If they by "Just Guessing" take down millions of songs, they are sparing
millions of dollars on royalties. Someone is getting that money.
If you/we are innocent than they (Spotify and Distribution) are robbing all
of us.
This is lobbing, Maffia's power, whatever.
A good lawyer could do a great job here.
Cheers

[erikstearns]

Those are some fantastic points. Not only that, when do the artists have
time to search these playlists out, especially when the accused are not even
hiring any of these "services". I know mine have been growing steadily
because of exposure and have not experienced exponential growth. Yet,
TuneCore takes my stuff down because of Spotify's false accusations.

As I've been recommending, go to Top Music Attorney on YouTube for updates
on this as she's been spearheading the movement against these injustices
against small and independent artists.

Thanks,

Erik.

[user-removed]

Same thing is happening to me, music got removed. I know I got added to a playlist for about 2 weeks that I did not pay for, and it resulted in thousands of streams. I suspected the streams were fake because of the 80:1 streams per listener ratio, but what was I supposed to do?

I just spoke with Spotify for Artists over the website chatbox, and they confirmed that this decision is up to Spotify's Content Team, but there is no way to contact them directly. They advised me to reach out to my distributor (DistroKid), and said "It's indeed up to our Content team, however, you can't contact them directly. They can only be contacted by distributors so it's best that you reach out to have them represent you regarding this takedown. Don't worry! It's an established process between distributors and Spotify."

The email I got from DistroKid to inform me of this takedown said "there is no way to appeal this decision", and another article of theirs suggested that I reupload the songs. I brought up this article with Spotify for Artists support, and they said, "Content detected to have been engaged in artificial streaming is removed from our service, and will remain down until further notice. Reuploading won't be an option for you at the moment but if your content is reinstated, the streams won't be lost. You can consider uploading a remixed version that won't be detected as a reupload of the song (songs with identical audio and duration are linked automatically) and will start at 0 streams."

I was getting like, 5 streams a day for the past few months... not a big deal dude, and don't even care about the royalties. How do we get our music playable again??

[user-removed]

Fun to spam the support staff here - https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/contact-spotify-anonymous/

[erikstearns]

Wow. I had no idea that this is happening to so many people. I'm
responding to a bunch of posts per day. I totally feel your situation as
the same thing happened with TuneCore. Unfortunately, I don't know if
there's another distribution service that I can recommend. I heard of Band
Camp, but don't know much about it. The only streaming service that hasn't
taken down my material is Number One Music (N 1 M dot com). I have to sneak
a URL. Otherwise, if you've seen my posts, you also may know about Top
Music Attorney. She's got a bunch of information on these scandals and may
be the one who spearheads a class action lawsuit.



Take Care,



Erik.

[JoseCorteReal]

Originally I was on Number one music, but they were a little complicated
and slow to accept new songs, so I moved to Routenote and until this year,
I was really glad with them. Now Concerning this issue, they don't take
down the artists (I produce some) but they take down the songs in all
streaming stores accepting Spotify's accusations of use of suspicious
services. Even Spotify is shooting blindly, they only guess or imagine that
some artists are cheating. They don't have any proof. Only when you are
playing on a suspicious playlist. But that is not certain that you use that
playlist but is the playlist, for their promotion use random artists music.
I've been caught by one of those playlists and contacted Spotify. They took
down the playlist, but they continue to accuse me of using those services
and didn't take back my music, it's unfair. I've done their job, telling
them about a playlist that should have been banned for ages. Spotify is a
bad loser, they don't accept that this was a lack of Spotify's security
and, or by what I understood a bug (some artists say they had only hundreds
of plays and were taken down... I contacted the lawyer, but they must want
some money for their job... Nothing is for free... But when you have 5000
plays of a taken down music you don't have any profit to get a lawyer.
Spotify knows that, that's why they do it with small artists and
Independents. They don't dare to do this with the majors, and majors are
well known in the pust to cheat big in the music market..
My music and productions here... Share if you like it.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7AmUTcQ9PH8wwCwzERJ7vZ

[erikstearns]

Thank you. I just gave your stuff a follow on Spotify!
Take care,
Erik.

[beesus]

I also am a victim of this scam. Our music "Dog Valley" was taken off the platform. We have never paid for artificial streams. As many other artist on the internet have mentioned, the only thing we used a few times, was the wheel of playlists on Distrokid's own website (which is free and promoted on their website). This is unacceptable to have a super aggressive algorithm for detecting artificial streams with no way to appeal. Yet not have the technology to deal with playlists that are the problem, making it so artists can control being added ,against their knowledge, to these bots. This is shaping up to being class action level bulls%&#.

[joeldavidmusic]

Same thing just happened to me today. Notice from DistroKid about my content being removed. I was targeted by 3 different bot playlists over the past 2 months, none of which I paid for. I reported each of them whenever they showed up in my Spotify for artists, since it was all skewed plays from Helsinki, Finland.

Spotify support didn't do much besides saying they didn't have any "takedown metadata" yet for my track and that I should contact DistroKid, and they didn't help either. Same boat as everything I've read here. It's wild because I was getting decent traction before this notice with 20-30 organic streams per day. The bot playlists shot it up to 1k per day (for 1 or 2 days before being removed) which was extremely obvious. My music hasn't officially been taken from Spotify yet, but I figure it'll probably be gone in the morning 😞