This Spotify bot scam keeps getting worse
A growing Spotify bot scam adds thousands of songs daily to playlists, generating fake streams that mislead artists into paying for worthless promotion. Spotify’s current crackdown punishes artists unfairly, while the root problem remains unresolved.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
Today we’re going to talk about this Spotify bot scam that keeps getting worse.
Nearly every artist i’ve met has been affected by this in the past year, so theres a good chance you’ve been added to some of these bot playlists too.
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What is the scam
A playlist company will add 2,000 or so songs by different artists per day to their playlist, pumps bots to all the songs on it (maybe even some followers) hoping the artist will see the spike in streams and check it out.
Inside of Spotify for Artists you can see the playlists that are streaming your music. This makes it very easy for the artists to see which playlists caused the spike in streams.
The playlist has contact information or a website link on it, and they're hoping someone falls for it and hires them for more fake promo.
I tried contacting one of these playlisting companies pretending to be interested in more promotion, and was able to figure out that WAVR AI is one of the companies running a lot of these. You can check it out in my video here:
Many people have been assuming that these scam companies are using the DistroKid Wheel Of Playlists to find artists and new songs to target. However i’m not sure about this because I do know some people on TuneCore that have been added to these playlists as well.
Why is it getting worse?
I made that video 8 months ago, and this problem still exists today. Not only does it seem more common nowadays but now Spotify is being more stringent about taking action against artists that have more than 90% of streams coming from bots.
While i’m glad they’re taking this tiny action towards fighting bots, you can see the problem that arises from this: artists are getting sent bot streams against their will, and Spotify is banning songs and artists for something they didn’t initiate.
It’s absolute insanity and Spotify should be embarrassed about this. Yes the playlist owner gets their playlist deleted, but they can simply go and make 1,000 more fake accounts. There is nothing an indie artist can do to fight against these bot streams.
Have beef with another indie artist? Send a couple hundred thousand bot streams to their profile and Spotify will probably pull their music from the platform.
What can be done?
I have some ideas for how Spotify can fix this issue, and here they are:
Make it impossible to put URL's or email addresses in the playlist descriptions
Provide some option for artists to report the playlists and have their songs removed from the playlist
Create better detection algorithms that punish the playlist creator and not the artists on the playlists
Switch to a user centric payment model that makes bots non-viable
Impose limits on the Spotify API that make it costly for bad actors to scale these types of bot attacks
Many people assume I have contacts at Spotify, but the reality is I don’t. I find it insane that this has been such a problem for so long and it makes me wonder if they just don’t consider it an important enough problem to fix.
If you want to help pressure Spotify to do something about this I have some ways that you can help.
I created a post on their ‘ideas’ page. Please go here and upvote my idea.
I have an email poll right below here, but you can also vote if you’ve experienced this on my YouTube community post here.
New Content
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In this video I show how much music artists get paid per stream across different streaming platforms, countries and over time.
Did you know you can listen to my music industry interviews on podcast platforms? Click here to listen to the Modern Music Marketing podcast.
News
Here are some music industry news highlights from the past week.
Apple Music introduced monthly version of ‘replay’
TikTok adds ‘add to music app’ feature to 163 more countries
EU opens probe into TIkTok
2023 was Live Nation’s biggest year ever
Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:
My courses. Spotify Growth Machine teaches you how to use Facebook ads to promote your music on Spotify. YouTube Growth Machine teaches you how to grow a YouTube channel organically and how to use YouTube ads. Fan Growth Machine teaches you how to build a website, online store and grow your email list.
My ad agency. Forbid Media specializes in running Facebook conversion ads to promote your music on Spotify.
Website / Store / Funnels. MusicFunnels is the best all-in-one platform for music artists to make a website, online store, sales funnels and build their mailing list.
1-on-1 consulting. You can book 1-hour calls with myself or Alex Bochel here.
My Links:
🌍 MusicFunnels - Best website / store / funnels for music artists (get your 14-day FREE trial!)
💿 Partnered Projects - the best Spotify playlist service
🧑💻 Consultations
🎬 Get 15% off Melodist music distribution with code ANDREW15 here
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I hope you enjoyed this edition of Music Marketing Monday! Please give your feedback using the poll below.
In case you’re curious what platform i’m using to run this newsletter, it’s called beehiiv.
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