Why Fake Streams Hurt Your Artist Profile

One decision with many disadvantages and no benefits is purchasing fake streams for your music. By doing this, you risk getting in trouble with streaming platforms and ending your career.

What are Fake Streams?

Fake streams are when someone plays or listens to music, a video, or a podcast without actually being a fan of the stuff they enjoy. Fake streams may be employed to raise play counts, illegally collect streaming royalties, or steal royalties from artists through identity theft.

These automated computer procedures produce peculiar streaming patterns inconsistent with how the ordinary human listener would typically behave. Artists that work hard and receive their streams from loyal Spotify fans are the ones who are hurt financially when money is paid to dishonest musicians. Spotify can reduce the number of streams, restrict visibility, delete tracks, and withhold payments from the at-fault artist if such fraudulent activity is discovered.

Why Do Fake Streams Hurt Artists

For a variety of reasons, fake streams are bad for artists. To begin with, streaming royalties from platforms such as Apple Music and Spotify are distributed from a set fund accessible to musicians who upload their music to the service. Because of this, streaming payments vary and are not fixed at a specific cost.

As a result, when artists obtain royalties from fake streams they did not legitimately earn, they are unfairly depleting the already meagre amounts of money available to artists. Fake streams are seen as fraud, and musicians who receive them risk being blacklisted or removing their music. In some circumstances, scamming streaming services through actions like identity theft might lead to you being sued.

Spotify Information Can Be Skewed

Several success stories exist of musicians who used the information obtained from Spotify to plan and execute a lucrative tour. Checking your Spotify for Artists dashboard for the locations where your music is streamed most frequently can help you determine the ideal area to tour. So, how can you plan a trip if bots generate your feeds? Artists making such choices are damaging their prospects of success and lying to themselves.

Fake Streams Do Not Dupe Big Labels

To attract the attention of the major labels, musicians who fake their streams also mostly misrepresent their age, status, Instagram follower count, and Spotify monthly listenership. The fun part about this is that savvy businesspeople can quickly identify bogus streams. They will become annoyed when they discover that bots are generating your broadcasts.

Music business experts today have a trained eye to recognize such artificial behavior if you're trying to persuade a crucial partner to join your project by portraying fake stream-fueled success. Typically, a company would sign an artist with more modest but genuine audience interaction. Second, purchasing fake music streams is a sure method to destroy your artists' algorithms profiles and their long-term algorithmic potential regarding algorithmic traffic.

Your Track Visibility Can Be Restricted

As soon as Spotify notices phony streaming behavior on your account, they will shadow-ban your music and stop it from growing popular.

You Might Be Sued

Spotify has the right to sue you if it discovers that you used this technique to get a sizable compensation from the service. For instance, in 2020, Spotify filed a lawsuit against an independent label called Sosa for utilizing millions of fictitious Spotify accounts to enhance the number of listens to its music.

No Sustained Growth Opportunity

There is no value in purchasing false streams unless you compose music just for bots and scripts. Music labels are not foolable since they have gotten wise to this tactic. And even with the most sophisticated bot farm, your "fake stream provider" can never succeed in fooling fake stream detection systems by simulating real user behavior as they create repetitive listens from a single user ID.

Users' behavior teaches recommender systems new things. They consider user retention and engagement indicators to provide appropriate suggestions to audiences likely to love your music. The listeners that adore you stream you frequently, add your songs to their libraries and playlists, and recommend you to friends are the ones who matter.

Any one-time streaming activity doesn't demonstrate a passion for your music; instead, it demonstrates a passing interest, telling the algorithm that your songs aren't memorable to your listeners and decreasing the likelihood that your collection will appear on algorithmic features.

Your Artist Similarity Profiles Can Be Screwed Up

Fake streams will harm your algorithmic potential in addition to low interaction rates. Moreover, they will "confuse" the recommendation engines by giving false data about your audience and the other artists they like. Fake users will never act like your genuine followers, and false streams will make it more difficult for computers to identify the artist's authentic audience. In extreme circumstances, the fake streams may outnumber the listenership produced by your true followers, giving the recommender the impression that you are comparable to other artists who also use the bot farm.

Fake Streams Will Only Hurt You and Other Artists

There are plenty of ways to misuse the fake stream market. Businesses that claim to increase stream numbers by using dubious playlists and click farms frequently collect money from artists while providing little in return.

A better option is advertising on Facebook and Google to gain more streams for your song. The service rules for Spotify do not prohibit such music marketing. Furthermore, there is nothing improper about sending your songs to Spotify and other music media outlets that compile playlists.

So if you're unsure whether to interact with someone promising playlist spots and streams in exchange for money, proceed cautiously. The best method is to go out there and authentically locate your audience. Although it will require time and work, it will be worthwhile in the long run.

Conclusion

No one wants to listen to a fake musician these days. Real artists try to reach a crowd that values their body of work. By inflating your stream numbers, you cannot build a real fan following to attend your shows and buy your merchandise.

To help you start to build real followers for your music consider GetPlaylisted, which is a service that pitches your music to hundreds of playlist curators, all without you having to lift a finger.

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