Eradicating streaming fraud

The biggest companies in music agree: Streaming manipulation, a practice that falsely inflates artists’ stream counts and reduces payouts for smaller acts, must be stopped.

The efforts to combat this “unfortunate blight” — as many refer to it — have largely fallen to the global nonprofit International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), and to Melissa Morgia, its acting director of global litigation. IFPI has pursued legal action in Germany and Brazil over the past 18 months, managing to shut down more than a dozen sites that make it as easy to buy artificial streams as it is to order a new T-shirt.

“We’re trying to take a global approach,” Morgia says. “We hope it then has a deterrent effect on people who might be attempting to engage in this business model.”

Attempts by artists and record labels to manipulate sales numbers are old hat. As streaming has become the industry’s primary driver, manipulation moved to the digital sphere. Artists or labels pay companies to generate thousands of new bot accounts that repeatedly play a song or playlist. In a 2019 panel, Louis Posen, president of Hopeless Records, said he believes the practice might be effecting $300 million in music revenue.

IFPI started going after services in Germany both because of “existing case law on a similar issue concerning fake reviews” and because any victories in the country would likely reverberate across the European Union. Morgia’s team argued, successfully, that sites offering streams for cash and creating artificial popularity illegally mislead consumers. “We’ll be looking to take further cases,” Morgia promises. “This benefits the broader music community.”