between 1% and 3% artificially inflated listening in 2021

This is the first study conducted on a very delicate subject in the world of music: the importance of the phenomenon of “false streams”. According to a study by the National Music Center published on Monday January 16, this practice concerned 1% to 3% of online listening (i.e. between 1 billion and 3 billion streams) in 2021. However, the income generated by these artificially inflated listening distorts the remuneration system for artists and producers.

For eighteen months, the authors of the study dissected the processes used to inflate the number of plays or views in order to create copyright for an artist, to improve the performance of a title in a charts, or to orient a recommendation system on playlists. These actions mechanically withdraw part of the remuneration of rights holders who do not cheat and erode confidence in this audio streaming market estimated, in 2022, at 383 million euros in France. by the National Syndicate of Phonographic Publishing.

Fraud techniques are becoming more and more sophisticated so that robots can count plays lasting more than thirty seconds, the minimum threshold for triggering rights. Between stream farms (networked computers), hacking of accounts, fake playlists and additions of titles on platforms, “the imagination of pirates is rich and evolving”says the study.

Creation of false rights holders

The simplest of techniques consists in joining the services of referencing sites which propose to increase, for a fee, the positioning of musical titles on the platforms. Promotion agencies also sell inclusions of titles in playlists. France Inter has thus obtained an email with prices from a company that promises streams “100% French, who are not “bots” [auditeurs virtuels]but real people who listen to your songs”. The prices range between 129 euros for the pack of 10,000 to 20,000 streams and 6,499 euros for more than one million streams.

The scam can go even further, to the creation of false rights holders. Fraudulent streams can then be generated in very large quantities by hacked accounts, or devoted to manipulation. “Zombies” can take control of a set of computers through the installation of a virus. An affiliate system by sending a malicious link can also create fake sites. Finally, by taking possession of existing accounts, hackers can carry out account cyberattacks without breaking into a database of millions of previously used emails or passwords. Not to mention the integration of fake titles on artist pages.

To conduct this study, the CNM collaborated without difficulty with most players in the music industry (Universal, Sony, Warner, Believe and Wagram) and the Deezer, Qobuz and Spotify platforms. The president of the CNM, Jean-Philippe Thiellay, deplores on the other hand that“Amazon Music, Apple Music and YouTube were unable or unwilling to share their data, despite all the guarantees of confidentiality that the CNM gave them”.

Importance of legal remedies

At Spotify and Deezer, a very large part of the fake streams detected come from hip-hop and rap, one of the most listened to genres. On Deezer, the share of fake streams is even higher for background music and non-musical titles. In the top 10,000 most listened to titles at Spotify, 96% of fraud comes from novelty and 93% from the French catalog.

The National Music Center proposes the development of an interprofessional charter for the prevention and fight against the manipulation of online listening

In this study, some rights holders and lawyers raised the possibility that this practice of fake streams is part of “in a strategy of laundering income from illegal or even criminal activities”. Hence the importance of legal remedies. Fraud, fraudulent access to an automated data processing system, deceptive commercial practice, tort liability, etc. are likely to be punished, the authors point out. But the main legal difficulty comes from the difficulty of identifying the sponsor at the origin of the request for manipulation.

In concrete terms, the CNM proposes the development of an interprofessional charter for the prevention and fight against the manipulation of online eavesdropping. It will bring together a monitoring committee of professionals harmed by this phenomenon and undertakes to conduct a new study on this hot topic in 2024.