The scam ran for four months before it was rumbled by Spotify. It would have cost the scammers $12,000 a month to run those 1,200 accounts, but the royalty payout to whoever released the tracks could have amounted to as much as $415,000 a month. One of those playlists rose through the Spotify chart to become the 35th most-streamed in the world. Low battery anxiety and how it relates to our mental healthĪ report released last year by analysts Music Business Worldwide highlighted a scam operating from Bulgaria, where 1,200 fake Spotify accounts were used to constantly play two playlists of tracks by unknown artists, all around 30 seconds long (the minimum amount of time for Spotify to identify it as a streamed play). One definition of fake streaming from Angel Gambino, chief commercial officer at Napster is: "anything which isn't fans listening to music they love" – and there's a lot of it happening, not least because money can be made by doing so. The opening track of 21 Savage's most recent album contains the lyrics: "How many faking they streams? / A lot / Getting they plays from machines? / A lot / I can see behind the smoke and mirrors …" The vulnerability of streaming statistics to manipulation is down to one fact: while computerised systems can register a track being played, there's no way it can know if someone is listening to it. Musicians have long had their suspicions. One label boss says as much as $300m (Dh1.1 billion) a year is being leeched from the industry by so-called "phantom listening". A group of 21 music industry companies, including streaming services, record labels and publishers, recently agreed on a "code of best practices" to tackle the problem.
But some of the numbers feeding those charts are being distorted and manipulated by "fake streaming". Official chart compilers such as Billboard use complex calculations to factor in the ways people consume music, while countless unofficial charts tell us what's popular and what's trending. Last year, South Korean boy band BTS sold a chart-topping five million copies of their two album s globally ( Love Yourself: Tear and Love Yourself: Answer ), but Canadian rapper Drake was the most-streamed artist, with 8.2 billion plays on Spotify alone. Who 's the most popular music ian in the world? The data generated by our listening habits should make this an easy question to answer, but it's far from straightforward.