MBW Views is a series of op-eds from eminent music industry people… with something to say. The following MBW op/ed was written by Victoria Oakley (pictured, left), Chief Executive Officer of the IFPI, the organization that represents the recording industry worldwide, and Mitch Glazier (pictured, right), CEO of the RIAA (The Recording Industry Association of America).
Here, Oakley and Glazier comment on the recording industry’s ongoing global efforts to combat streaming fraud and suggest what the music business could do to put an end to it.
Streaming fraud is a quiet threat.
It’s often undetected, but it’s happening now and at scale. It’s siphoning vital revenues away from the artists, songwriters, record labels, music publishers and others who power the music economy.
The mechanics are simple. Every day, fraudsters exploit gaps in music platforms’ protections and across the supply chain. These criminals upload tracks via distributors and deploy armies of ‘bots’ to create artificial ‘plays’ of those tracks to generate income.
Because streaming services pay rightsholders from a finite pool of revenue, income is being diverted from legitimate creators who attracted users, subscriptions, and advertising to these platforms in the first place.
This is theft, plain and simple.
And with the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), the practice has been industrialized, enabling the mass creation of artificial content and artificial listening, and making large-scale fraud cheaper and faster to perpetrate – and harder for systems to detect.
So how can it be fixed?
It requires a toolbox with varied but proactive and evolving approaches, along with robust enforcement that addresses both the artificial content that is used for fraud and the fake listening.
IFPI, representing the recorded music industry worldwide, has taken legal action against many organizations behind these manipulation services.
We’ve disrupted and shut down illegal sites in Germany, France, Brazil and Canada, and we work with governments and law enforcement to help investigate and prosecute these crimes.
But to stop fraud at scale, the organizations with the data and leverage to prevent this fraudulent activity – including streaming services, content aggregators, and distributors – must act together.
So, what needs to be done?
- Implement Robust Identity Verification: Distributors need to know who is providing content to their services and digital service providers (DSPs) need to verify that accounts are used by real humans who are genuinely engaging with music and not ‘bots’. These kinds of requirements are used in a variety of industries, such as banking, and involve verifying the identity of clients, including a determination of the level of risk that they could engage in unlawful activity.
- Vigorously Vet the Content: Distributors must put in place measures to verify not only the identity of their clients, but the legitimacy of their content before it goes live. The authenticity of both the customer and the content should be regularly reviewed.
- Leverage Ecosystem Data: DSPs have the advantage of seeing across the entire ecosystem and they must leverage this bird’s-eye view. This means using first-class measures to be more effective in detecting, shutting down and mitigating the impact of fake plays and suspicious playlists.
- Cross-Industry Intelligence Sharing: When a bad actor is identified by one platform or service, they shouldn’t be able to simply move their “business” to another. Information in respect of known bad actors and their methods should be shared to prevent them from evading enforcement and repeating their behaviour. That means regularly updating measures to capture new fraudulent activity and actors based on shared learnings.
These actions amount to something simple and essential: streaming services and distributors working together to identify, disrupt, and shut out fraudsters who abuse the system.
This is essential as generative AI continues to grow and develop.
Record labels are working to meet these standards. And, if we collectively use existing tools to share intelligence and apply best practices, we can make streaming fraud genuinely difficult and expensive to pursue.
But it will happen only if the entire music community comes together and commits to meaningful, sustained action. Music Business Worldwide
