The ” fake streams are more numerous than one might have imagined, according to a report by the National Music Center.
Those fake streams, fake listens, are used to inflate audience figures for a track or album on music streaming platforms. Alerted by the phenomenon, the National Music Center investigated. And he has just produced his first report.
Up to 3 billion fake streams
How do you know if a YouTuber or Instagrammer has influence? Our first movement is obviously to look at the number of views or followers. A figure so important that it has created a real counterfeiting industry, thanks to which it is possible to boost its counters.
And this logic also applies to music streaming. The more a track or album seems to have been listened to, the better the artist’s showcase. So some call on fake streams to make people believe that they are more popular than they really are.
The authorities, alerted, wanted to quantify the phenomenon. In 2021, the Minister of Culture Roselyne Bachelot had thus asked the National Center for Music (CNM) to take on the task. It’s now done. And according to his report, published this Monday, January 16, 1 to 3 billion plays would be false in France, or 1 to 3% of the music streaming market.
Rap, the main consumer of fake streaming
While the American giants Apple Music, YouTube and Amazon Music did not cooperate, the CNM was able to obtain very detailed data from Spotify, Qobuz and Deezer. These players in the field rely on certain atypical behaviors to detect fakes, such as tapping over a very long period, or those carried out in accelerated mode.
And in the world of music, a genre seems very fond of these fake streams : rap. With 85% of fictitious plays detected on Spotify and 27% of those spotted on Deezer, street music is by far the biggest consumer of counterfeits. Other more astonishing sectors are also concerned, thus relaxation music would represent 12.3% of false listening on Qobuz.
In order to combat this tendency, the CNM recommends the establishment of an interprofessional charter for preventing and combating the manipulation of online eavesdropping “. The public establishment also requests intervention on the subject of the repression of fraud.
Source : France Info
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