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

[erikstearns]

I can tell you that the way TuneCore works, when they take something down,
it seems to be gone forever. I tried reuploading the first album that was
taken down, but they shot that down too. So I'm not sure at this point what
to do.

[erikstearns]

Hi there,

Here's something you might want to look into. I hope this helps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuwwDSBikx8

[lukerfitz]

Hey, just realised that this has just happened to my entire album. Released last November, and now gone! I reached out to spotify for artists and the person said that I would need to talk to my distributor. I told them that my issue was with spotify, not the distributor......to which the person replied ''Contact your distributor, I am ending the chat now''. What the **bleep**!!!? Most of my tracks have a few hundred/thousand streams. Never paid to be on a playlist. What. the. **bleep**??

Spotify has felt shady as f**k to me for years. I will use this opportunity to get off it for good. 

- RainJamerson

[mikeo1031]

I had the same thing happen to me yesterday. A song of mine was taken down on Spotify. I spent over an hour communicating with them last night and they told me to contact the distributor (Distrokid). Distrokid said that Spotify took the song down. Spotify also said that a song of mine was flagged for artificial streams (a different song than the one that they took down). I have never paid to be on a playlist, but I do see at times that some unknown person will stream a song of mine numerous times in one day. No dies who, or why. No playlist is ever associated with these streams either. All we did was go around in circles. Nothing was solved. 

[OGruber]

This happened to me too. Spotify Support just closed my chat each time I try to get answers. They literally say "I am going to end the conversation" after I ask them for answers. 

[MarshmallowTheCorgi]

@lukerfitz Yes, that's a lot of us. Remember that your listeners are humans who are just as angry or in some cases even angrier than you are at this point.


- realnotperfect

[Fullynikoo]

 Hello people, I got my songs deleted that together they made 300M+ streams.. and it's under investigation because ""fake streams"" and it's understandable, 300M streams it's not a low number tbh I've been researching and I found out that most of the people that had this type  of problem were DistroKid users. After 4 weeks I got a response of DistroKid support because I was panicking because 300M streams are like more than a million dollars and that's a lot of money that people like me REALLY needs. I didn't got a response on how much they will be investigating my music.. I'll attach the mail below.

[m1ke1]

If Spotify is so good at detecting ‘artificial streaming’ why are they so bad at detecting bot playlists and shutting them down? 

[DoomNation]

I’ve had this happen to me several times. I reported these clowns to Spotify for each instance, and Spotify still reported me to Distrokid saying that my track was flagged

for artificial streaming. Luckily they didn’t pull my track but I had to contact both my Distributer and Spotify saying that it’s a result of these scammer companies adding me to their playlist and I had nothing to do with it. You can report the playlists but they will make dozens of clones. 

[Dell_Ray]

Not just for this particular issue but I  have been very dissatisfied with several things Spotify has either done or not done to the point where I actually cancelled my premium subscription twice and went to other services for my needs. However over the past year or so, they have gotten better at listening to our struggles with them and have gotten better at implementing things we want and getting rid of things we don, although the latter is still not the greatest but I don't care too much about features that I won't or don't use so much as I do about them removing useful ones or not implementing ones that would be useful and they have been at least giving us the opportunity to voice these issues and considering them with the voting system and I've actually seen a huge improvement in customer service where before it was pretty much non existent, now there is actually a decent department if you can get to it. That's the difficult part but at least it's there. Keep on about your issue and if you can get to the actual Spotify customer service department instead of the opinionated and ill advised "community" you will find a much better way of getting things in motion.