Over the past couple years Spotify has been trying, and failing, to crack down on bot streams on their platform. More artists that have done nothing wrong get their music pulled than artists actually committing artificial streaming.
In this post i’ll talk about what artificial streaming is, how most artists get caught up in it, some myths revolving around this problem, and what you can do about it.
What is artificial streaming?
When people say artificial streaming they’re typically talking about bots, meaning a fake non-human account on Spotify ‘listening’ to music to inflate numbers. However it can also include humans artificially consuming music such as looping the same song 24 hours a day for weeks on end.
Starting in 2024 Spotify has been enforcing a 90% artificial streaming policy, where when 90% of the streams on a song are artificial in a pay period they fine the distributor and/or pull the song. This wasn’t the start of the problem, but this made things much worse.
Spotify playlist scam
By far the largest reason artists are getting their music pulled is being added to playlists against their will. There is a scam going around where the playlist owner randomly adds 2,000 new songs to their playlist(s) each day, and sends a bunch of bot streams to all the songs on the playlist.
Why would someone do such a thing? Well, it’s basically their marketing tactic. Artists can see playlists in Spotify for Artists, so when they see the spike in streams they click on the playlist and see their contact info in the playlist description.
How can I get off of a botted playlist?
If you’re on one of these playlists, you’re probably wondering how to get off. Unfortunately there is no guaranteed way to take your music off of any playlist. You’re essentially limited to the following options:
- Email the scam company asking to be removed (but very likely they were already going to remove you within 1-2 days anyways)
- Contact Spotify artist support and inform them of the issue, where they will shame you and blame you for using bots (you naughty boy/girl) even though you didn’t initiate it
- Contact your distributor and inform them that you had nothing to do with it
As you can probably tell, these options suck. There is pretty much nothing you can do about it. Spotify will effectively always assume that botted streams on a song are initiated by the artist. Imagine going to the police to report a crime committed against you and having them arrest you instead because clearly it was your fault.
Is DistroKid causing artificial streaming?
Many artists on Reddit have been speculating for years that DistroKid was somehow at fault here, specifically their wheel of playlists feature. The reason is that most artists reporting about getting on these botted playlists do in fact use DistroKid.
I can confirm that DistroKid itself is definitely not the problem. Here are the distributors i’ve seen affected by this artificial streaming problem:
- DistroKid
- CD Baby
- Tunecore
- Amuse
- Landr
- United Masters
- The Orchard
- Literally every other fucking distributor that exists
I apologize for my language. I’ve seen artists switch away from DistroKid to CD Baby to avoid this problem, only to have it happen against on that platform and have their music pulled there as well.
Why do we see DistroKid coming up most of the time we hear about artists getting their music pulled? Well, 70% of all new music released each month is distributed through DistroKid and they’re the worlds largest distributor by a mile. Your blame should directly go to Spotify specifically.
Now even though it’s not isolated to DistroKid it doesn’t mean DistroKid can’t improve things. I think they need to get rid of their wheel of playlists because that is definitely a target source for these scam playlists. But so are the Hypeddit chart playlists, other distributor playlists, etc… It also doesn’t help that DistroKid’s site tells you to not use any promotion service when the actual problem is Spotify itself.
While I agree you should always vet promotion services you’re hiring and understand how things work, they’re making it sound like ALL music marketing services are a scam. The truth is that there are a ton of scams but telling artists that 100% of them are scams doesn’t help anyone.
How to prevent music being pulled
There is 1 measure you can take to prevent your music from falling victim to artificial streaming and being removed. Drumroll please….
Promote your music!
Remember earlier when I said Spotify has a 90% artificial streaming threshold? Well, don’t allow the fake streams to represent 90% of your monthly stream counts on your music. By promoting / marketing your music to real listeners you’re forcing the artificial streams to represent a smaller and smaller share of overall streams.
I’ve never had an artist I work with have their music pulled after they’ve started marketing their music, so the strategy works. It also explains why you only hear about very small artists having problems.
I’ll give you some quick options for how you can start marketing your music today:
- Running ads – this is my favorite method because the budget can be whatever you want, and the engagement is super high
- Social media content – you’ve heard it before, but posting on social media is definitely a viable strategy for music marketing
- SubmitHub or Groover – getting on a handful of small to medium sized tightly curated and accurate playlists for very cheap
Of course there are a million ways to promote your music, so check out the other articles on this site or my YouTube channel for more ideas and tutorials!
