Spotify has a bot problem, plain and simple. It’s a problem that in my opinion has gotten so out of hand that the streaming service itself has no idea what to do to fix the issue. So what’s the best course of action here? Well, it seems according to Spotify, it’s to pass the buck onto distributors who then pass the blame onto artists, cutting them off at the knee without a single chance to appeal.
Before we get into it let’s rewind a second.
Last year Spotify announced some big changes coming to how it pays out to artists and within those changes were a handful of new policies on how it plans to deal with artists who bot their music. Essentially, if an artist is found having a high percentage of artificial streams – as Spotify are calling them – then they’ll have their music removed.
Seems pretty straightforward forward right? If an artist doesn’t want to get their music taken down and permanently removed from the platform, they simply don’t buy plays or streams. But there’s a much bigger problem here that Spotify isn’t addressing…
“Why would someone want to buy streams?” I hear you cry. It’s a difficult question to answer without making assumptions and discussing rumours, but as music streaming has become the main way we consume music, vanity metrics such as monthly listeners, streams, and all these other figures give an illusion of popularity.
There’s also the suggestion that Spotify’s own algorithms are triggered at certain stream milestones, whether that’s a stream figure or via Spotify’s own secret (but not so secret) popularity score it gives to artists and releases. So artists giving a little boost to trigger these algorithmic playlists may also be a reason why.
Then there are rumours that certain popular artists used stream bots to give them a huge boost and get them to where they are today, something that could absolutely influence someone to do the same thing.
Because of this, there are hundreds if not thousands of third-party services that promise to give artists “organic” streams and playlist placements if they pay a small fee. This fee ranges anywhere from $50 to $5000, but they all pretty much offer the same thing; by utilising bot farms they can boost streaming numbers for artists wanting to hit it big. It’s a scummy, predatory, and downright gross.
How these services work also varies as they become more and more elaborate in order to avoid detection. I’ve seen clips of bot farms with walls of cheap smartphones set up all playing tracks over and over. There are also more elaborate ways to do it that are far beyond my understanding, using coding, servers, and network spoofing to avoid detection.
The point here, however, is that I’m almost certain this has been ticking away behind the scenes for years with Spotify doing little in the way of fixing the problem, at least publicly, anyway. This is why I feel Spotify has lost control of the bot situation, I believe these third-party services are developing ways to avoid detection quicker than Spotify can thwart the problem and they’re panicking.
Now, remember that problem I mentioned earlier? Well, here’s where things are quickly going wrong for Spotify and independent artists. The way a lot of these predatory third-party services try and get business is by randomly adding artists’ music onto their bot-fuelled playlists and giving them a taste of what they could get if they paid for their “organic” playlisting service. Before Spotify’s new policies, these usually just went unnoticed but with this new policy, artists are finding themselves victim to this and thus having their music removed without the ability to appeal.
Since the new policies came into place social media has been awash with artists sharing that their music was added to one of these playlists and subsequently removed from Spotify by their distributor, or artists seeing sudden spikes from Helsinki and worrying if they’re also victims. Spoiler, they usually are.
Is this actually the artist’s fault? Admittedly, Spotify is in a tricky spot here as there’s no real way to determine whether an artist paid for bots or whether they’re a victim of these scummy third-party services. With a lack of ability to appeal or having no solution offered by Spotify when it’s flagged to them via Artist Support, this is making artists feel lost and doubtful they even want to deal with Spotify anymore, which I believe is unfair.
My question is, if Spotify can detect artificial streams, why is it doing nothing to curb this from happening at the source, rather than pushing the blame on majoratively blameless artists?
To add to this, as an artist myself and an owner of an independent label, I receive regular artificial stream reports that Spotify issues to its partners and within those reports I regularly see small handfuls of “natural” artificial streams on our releases, including my own. Tracks with anything from 10 to 30 counts of artificial streams which compared to the data I see in Spotify for Artists, there’s no obvious source of these streams.
So with that, this is why I firmly believe that Spotify has a bot problem that it has lost complete control of. I’d also hazard a guess that there’s a fair percentage of users that the company includes in its quarterly earning reports that are bot accounts.
Spotify needs to do more to address this problem from within the company as opposed to passing the buck onto artists who, for the most part, have zero control over where their music is placed within Spotify’s ecosystem.