What is artificial streaming?
Artificial streaming refers to any activity intended to manipulate streaming counts, listener numbers, popularity metrics, playlist performance or royalty payments through non-genuine listening activity.
This includes, but is not limited to:
- Streaming bots or automated scripts
- Click farms or stream farms
- Paid streaming services
- Purchased followers or listeners
- Pay-for-play playlist schemes
- Incentivised listening campaigns
- Any service guaranteeing streams, listeners or playlist placements
Artificial streaming violates the policies of Spotify and many other digital service providers.
Why artificial streaming matters
Artificial streaming harms the wider music industry by diverting royalties away from legitimate artists, distorting listener data, undermining editorial and algorithmic recommendations, damaging artist credibility and increasing the risk of content removal or account sanctions.
Streaming platforms invest significant resources into detecting and preventing artificial activity to ensure royalties are distributed fairly.
Potential consequences
Where artificial streaming activity is detected, DSPs may take action including:
- Removal of streams from reporting
- Withholding of royalties
- Removal of tracks or releases
- Suspension of artist profiles
- Catalogue restrictions
- Financial penalties charged to distributors
Repeated or serious violations may result in the removal of content from one or more DSPs.
Our policy
HighEQ Ltd and Real Playaz Ltd are committed to maintaining the integrity of streaming platforms and protecting legitimate artists from the impact of artificial streaming.
We actively educate artists and labels regarding artificial streaming risks through our onboarding process, new client intake procedures, client communications, handbook guidance and public educational resources.
We strongly advise all clients to avoid any service that offers guaranteed streams, guaranteed playlist placements, guaranteed listener numbers, artificial promotion methods or automated streaming activity.
If an offer sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
Artificial streaming charges & penalties
From time to time, DSPs may apply penalties or charges to distributors where artificial streaming activity has been detected on specific content.
Where permitted under our agreements, any such charges will be attributed only to the artist, label, release or account responsible for the violating content.
Artificial streaming penalties will never be distributed across, charged to, or recovered from artists, labels or rights holders who were not responsible for the offending content.
This ensures that legitimate artists are not negatively impacted by the actions of bad actors.
Communication policy
Where artificial streaming penalties are incurred, we will accurately communicate that any charge has been applied to us as the distributor by the DSP.
We will not state or imply that Spotify has directly charged an artist or label.
Where applicable, we may recover costs associated with violating content in accordance with our distribution agreement and internal policies.
Learn more
Spotify provides additional guidance regarding artificial streaming, playlist scams and platform compliance through Spotify for Artists. We encourage all artists and labels to familiarise themselves with these guidelines and to focus on genuine audience growth through legitimate marketing and fan engagement.
Spotify Artificial Streaming Guidance