17 Comments

So true. How does one fight this whether weaponized or by happenstance? And the next question: does an A-lister who gets 1MM listens monthly get penalized if an older track suddenly gets attention and boosts their monthly listens to 1.5MM plays the next month?

If not, that’s a whole other level of discrimination against indie or developing artists.

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Well that's it: you just can't. I could buy plays on some dodgy service, sink your track, and you'd have little to no means to prove it was me I don't think...

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Yep

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It's absolutely on the DSP to address this. With great power comes great responsibility, as they say.

I'm a jazz musician, a genre that gets relatively few streams compared to more popular music. Part of many jazz players practice is transcription (learning and writing down a solo/piece by ear) which can mean streaming a track sometimes hundreds of times over a short period. Often these are not popular tracks. It seems we need to worry that choosing to transcribe a solo could result in harm to that artist... It's on the DSP to address this - there is no sympathy when they are making billions of dollars off the business model that enables this.

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Distrokid is just the worst possible option. There are no humans to communicate and at the end of the day is their decision to pull out the track, to avoid any confrontation with Spotify (since it's their responsibility, they can even receive fines for this).

A "proper" distributor is already complicated, with Distrokid (or any similar service) just hopeless.

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A good friend of mine runs the Spotify team in Nashville. She told me they’re always getting young songwriters who upload their first song, their mom gets excited and plays it constantly, and it gets flagged as a bot 😂

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Thanks to everyone for bringing this untenable situation to light. I asked cdbaby for help and proof. , but heard nothing. I told them they should be defending us indie artists. Months and months have gone by and there’s no response. In spite of all the talk how they help us. We seem to be constantly in the process of being marginalized and monetized.

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"Project Fallen is two unnamed producer/DJs reconnecting" - well you've blown this wide open haven't you.

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😂😂😂😂😂

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This is a problem we're facing with a few of our smaller artists: some bot playlister puts them on their playlist for a few hours, they get a couple thousand streams and if the artist is curious, s.he goes on her SFA page, sees where these streams come from and contacts the playlister who then asks her for a fee to include her song and get her more streams.

Most of the time, artists ignore this, but more and more they get a warning or worse, a takedown notice, from Spotify.

So Spotify is blaming the artists when they should be blaming these playlisters. I fail to understand how they can't see that these playlists are obviously bot-fueled, and why they don't attack the problem at the root instead of attacking and taking down the artists...

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TBH I think the only solution here can be provided by Spotify because they are the platform provider, and therefore the only people who can (I assume) see more info on where plays are coming from etc.

The question however is whether Spotify can be bothered to improve the whole setup (if we assume that 1, they have been working to combat fraud already, and 2, clearly aren't doing a great job if stuff like this keeps happening)

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I feel your pain. This was a concern I also had with the few songs I had on Spotify and other services. I have taken them down my self and not bothered too much with music, hoping one day my creativity would spark once again.

I think have an «for artist» page with all streaming services is key to at least have a chance to do something or at least perhaps be able to reach out to the services.

In the end, it’s not all about number of streams, buy also how many unique users are streaming as well. Some of this data is available from those backend pages. And Spotify surely has access to see «everything».

Stay creative and I hope this won’t stop you from publishing more songs.

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To be totally honest, I've lost faith in posting anything to Spotify anyway. It just feels like wasted effort now. I'd sooner plough time and energy into Bandcamp where we've seen infinitely more success, and a LOT more money coming back - and all within about 24hrs of a sale happening too.

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That’s awesome.

May I know the link to your bandcamp? Curious about what music you make.

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There's all manner of EPs and albums not yet out too so drop me a message if you'd like some private SoundCloud links.

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I had the same thing happen to me. Distributor has no say or leverage. There was no route to complain/contest - Spotify never created one. After much badgering; they said Spotify have put a system in place to challenge the take down. Completed the form. Nothing. It’s all a rise.

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