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

[KrustyRockStar]

I'm an Artist with Distrokid as my distributor.

Today, I received a heartbreaking email that told me the entire track got removed from Spotify due to "artificial streaming".

I do not, in any way deny that it could be the case (without my knowledge) but it was genuinely unintentional.

Many small independent Artists like myself are constantly looking for ways to promote our music to help grow our career. Since Spotify does not have an official promotion service (like Adwords for Youtube), there are tons of third party services out there varying from plain-sight obvious scams to possibly genuine. However, as you can imagine, it is always a gamble when trusting someone new to promote your music.

I would happily invest in Spotify official campaigns or any promoters that Spotify endorses, but they do not exist?

I honestly wished I could pin-point which particular promoter was the culprit as I've done full-blown $2,000-$3,000 press release campaigns and smaller, more focused Spotify campaigns for a particular track.

It feels a little unfair that there were no warnings to this or having a penalty whereby the "fake streams" would be just removed instead of the entire track. Of course, the Spotify analytics could give me a red flags if the promoter was using fishy-methods, but by that time, there's nothing I can do to reverse it.

This has hurt me real bad and I am absolutely devastated.

What can I do about it now? Is there a chance Spotify would show some compassion and reinstate the track?

Am I even allowed to reupload the track again under a different or same ISRC number?

Any advice would be dearly appreciated.

[vanishingshores]

This happened to me as well. I find this to be unfair as it is impossible for an artist to be able to 'police' every utilization of their track by each user. Wouldn't it make more sense to address the issue with the user and creator of the playlist instead of devastating an artist's career by this removal? In addition, no details or proof was given for the 'artificial streaming'. I find that also to be unfair and just another way to keep the 'little guy' down.

[KrustyRockStar]

Funny coincidence that everyone on here reported that to occur on Sunday (03/01/2021).
I'm with Distrokid as my distributor and they are actually offering a free Counter Notification appeal to Spotify specific to this issue.
However, I'm a little bit worried about doing it as I have likely used the same marketing service for other tracks too. In a fruitless effort to try and restore 1 track, I may end up having everything else pulled down without warning.

Spotify team just needs to show some empathy towards poor small artists.

If you try a marketing service and the results seem shady, you stop using them. You may try another one to see if it's legitimate, and the process repeats itself.
However, once a service has been initiated, there's absolutely no way to reverse the results. In other words, any decision mistakes becomes absolutely permanent. It sucks big time.

[Ivan]

Hey @KrustyRockStar and @vanishingshores, 

Help’s here!

In case you've got your track removed from Spotify for any reason make sure you get in touch with our team at Spotify for Artists. The folks will be able to get a closer look and assist you further.       

You can reach out to them here.    

Hope this helps. Let us know if you have any questions.  

[vanishingshores]

Actually Spotify help provided no information or any offer for help at all. They said that my distributor would have all of the information, but they do not. The response from Spotify was formulaic, dismissive, and condescending. No concern or offer to help was expressed. It is apparently no big deal for Spotify to negatively impact an artist’s career with absolutely no sharing of proof or means of rebuttal. 

[KrustyRockStar]

I've actually started following a Twitter post with hundreds of comments between @SpotifyCares and @DistroKid.

It's still going on and there's over a hundred artists on there posting on it. It turns out there may be something more involved like a bugged algorithm or some sort. There were people who released tracks with literally zero streams and yet their tracks were still taken down.

Something isn't quite right  here.

There's also a petition signed by 1,400+ people for Spotify to reinstate the thousands of tracks they took down in one day.

You guys should check it out too and see what you can learn from it.

[nobodyatall1]

Did you ever get your song re-instated? I just got the same email even though I did not manipulate my streams at all. I’m hoping they’ll fix it 😕

[JonBoy20]

I haven't gotten any emails about my songs being taken down, but I did get an email from my distributor that my account is "under investigation".  

Now all of a sudden I have zero listeners when I usually have 5-10 at any given moment.  And I am constantly sending new listeners over through ads.  

[Alex]

Hi @JonBoy20,

Welcome to the Community!

Sorry to hear that this has happened to your and your songs are being targeted like that.

It's best you reach out directly to our Artist Support here. They'll be able to help you further with this.

Cheers.

[nobodyatall1]

Hey Jon! I’m sorry this happened to you 😞 Do you have any update? I had a song pulled recently too because of a playlist and was wondering if they helped you out. Good luck with all this