Potential repercussions from fans creating artificial streams?

January 29, 2024 2:51 AM

I'm a fan of a musician who was mostly unknown until an event last year put them into the spotlight, the fanbase is still fairly small though (~ 80k monthly listeners on Spotify currently). A handful of their fans have taken to setting up small streaming farms for Spotify and Deezer, using multiple accounts and putting their latest single on a 24/7 loop from multiple devices. I'm wondering about potential negative side effects from this.

Ethical considerations aside (I am not a fan of this practice), how big is the risk that this could actually cause problems for the artist by triggering the streaming platforms' fraud detection algorithms? I see the numbers going up rapidly on Spotify and the song is actually charting on Deezer in one country, so the tactic seems to be working so far but I'm worried about potential long-term repercussions.

Googling is giving me mixed results varying from "might get them removed off the streaming service altogether" over "it only matters if it's the artist themselves doing it" to "streaming platforms don't care at all as long as it makes them money". So I'd be glad to hear from anyone who has actual experience with this. Thanks!

posted by anonymous to Media & Arts (2 answers total)

I know looping and multiple accounts from the same IP gets those numbers thrown out. So if a song is streamed 27 times by 27 different IPs and played "organically" or not looped, Spotify will could that as 27 streams. If a song is streamed 27 times in a day by three IPs or looped 10 times, then that song has 0 streams. It might impact their revenue, as small at it is from streaming services. The biggest issue is when you have large fandoms groups that are presumed to be bot farming or gaming the streaming system. In those case, Spotify and other have repeated changed the definition of what a unique stream is and how to weight them and they do it regularly to prevent fans from pushing an artist higher on the charts than they "deserve."

One of the BTS members had a solo song that was number one one week and the plummeted the next even though the actual stream numbers remained high solely because Billboard and Spotify changed the definition of a unique stream.

On spotify, the best way is to create a playlist with the targeted song and related songs by the same artist or similar artists. If you have the targeted song repeat every 4-5 songs, it currently doesn't register as looping. BTS fandom (ARMY) has done a lot of research on this and there are few good guides on the internet to how to work the system to best benefit the artist. Here's one.

Good luck.
posted by teleri025 at 10:27 AM on January 29 [3 favorites]

It depends on the platform, but typically only the songs that are detected by the algorithms at the time of detection will be flagged (so usually not older songs that have had the same treatment if it hadn't been caught before), and typically the songs will be removed, not the artist themselves. If the artist can prove that it's not them doing the farming then the songs can usually be reinstated.
posted by womb of things to be and tomb of things that were at 3:50 AM on January 30