The Music Streaming Scam Epidemic
Bot farms, fake albums on real profiles, AI acts with millions of listeners: what the fraud cases show, what platforms changed, and why I trust real rooms.
When I first wrote this piece, in September 2025, it was an angry list of cases. A year later the cases have become numbers, a court sentence and a series of policy changes. The problem has not gone away. It has become easier to describe, and that is a start.
My position has not changed. Streaming is a tool I use, not a place where a career can live on its own. Fraud on the platforms does not just steal money from independent artists. It turns the stream itself into an unreliable unit, and an unreliable unit cannot measure the value of anyone’s work.
I wrote about how money moves on Spotify in Breaking Free from the Spotify Mindset. This is the other half: who is stealing it, and how.
Three kinds of scam
What gets called “streaming fraud” is really three different things, and they need different answers.
Bot farms on cheap catalogues. Someone uploads thousands of tracks, often AI-generated, and streams them with fake accounts. Each track earns a little; together they earn a lot. The money comes out of the same pool that pays real artists.
Fake releases on real profiles. An uploader sends an album to a distributor under an existing artist’s name, and the platform files it on that artist’s page. In summer 2025 the folk singer Emily Portman found an album called Orca under her name that she had never made, and fake tracks appeared under the names of Jeff Tweedy, Father John Misty, Sam Beam and Jakob Dylan, as the BBC reported. 404 Media found an AI-generated song on the official page of Blaze Foley, who was killed in 1989.
Synthetic acts presented as people. In 2025 The Velvet Sundown passed a million monthly listeners on Spotify, denied being AI, and then rewrote its bio as a “synthetic music project”, as Rolling Stone reported. In early 2026 a singer called Sienna Rose reached almost three million monthly listeners before Deezer stated that her music was fully AI-generated, according to the BBC.
The first is theft. The second is identity theft. The third is not illegal in itself, but it is a lie told to listeners, and it competes for the same attention as the rest of us.
The first verdict
For years the bot farm was something everyone talked about and nobody went to prison for. That changed this autumn.
Michael Smith, a musician from North Carolina, was charged in September 2024 in what federal prosecutors in Manhattan called the first criminal case of its kind in the United States. Between 2017 and 2024 he created hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs and used thousands of bot accounts to stream them billions of times on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music. He pleaded guilty in March 2026 to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. On 6 October 2026, Judge John G. Koeltl sentenced him to 18 months in prison and ordered him to forfeit $8,091,843.64, reported Music Business Worldwide. Prosecutors had asked for at least 46 months.
Eighteen months for eight million dollars. Some will find it light. I find the precedent more important than the number: streaming fraud is now, in plain terms, wire fraud, and the royalties it diverts belong to someone.
Denmark got there earlier, without AI. A man who used fake accounts to stream tracks he had released under his own name was sentenced in 2024, and an appeal court later raised the sentence.
What the numbers say
Deezer publishes the most useful figures because it detects AI-generated music and says so. In July 2026 it reported that fully AI-generated tracks passed half of all new uploads in June, around 90,000 tracks a day. Yet those tracks account for only 1 to 3 percent of streams. And up to 85 percent of the streams they did receive in 2025 were fraudulent. Across the whole catalogue, Deezer counted 8 percent of 2025 streams as fraud.
Read those figures together. Most fully synthetic music is not made to be listened to. It is made to be streamed by machines. The flood is not a new genre. It is a delivery system for theft.
What the platforms changed
In 2025 my main complaint was that Spotify moved quickly against small artists and slowly against obvious fraud. Some of that has shifted.
- April 2024Bot streams spread across millions of tiny tracksTracks need 1,000 streams a year to earn royalties, and labels and distributors are charged per track when flagrant artificial streaming is detected.
- September 2025Voice clones, spam uploads, no AI creditsAn impersonation policy that bans unauthorised vocal clones, a spam filter, and support for AI disclosures in credits. Spotify said it had removed over 75 million spam tracks in the previous twelve months.
- March 2026Fake albums on real profilesArtist Profile Protection, in beta: artists can approve releases before they appear on their page.
- August 2026Synthetic acts passing as peopleAn "AI Persona" label for profiles built on a fictional, photorealistic identity, excluded from editorial and algorithmic recommendations by default.
That last one answers a suspicion I voiced a year ago, that the recommendation system was quietly favouring AI acts. Whatever was true then, the stated policy now runs the other way.
Where it still fails
These are real steps. They are also partial.
Artist Profile Protection is opt-in and, for now, open to a limited group. Declining a fake release on Spotify does not stop it going live on other services. The dead cannot opt in, unless an estate runs their account. The AI Persona label describes the identity on the profile, not how the music was made, so an act with a cartoon avatar or no face at all is not covered.
And the collateral damage has not stopped. Artists who never bought a fake stream still see releases pulled because bots touched their tracks, often from a playlist they never asked to be on. Saving Country Music has documented whole albums taken down on that basis. The per-track penalty lands on distributors, and distributors protect themselves by acting first and asking later. The artist sits at the end of that chain with the least information and the least leverage.
Moving to another platform is not an escape. In August 2025 YouTube confirmed it had been altering creators’ Shorts with machine learning without telling them. Every platform makes decisions about your work that you do not see.
Protect your name
None of this replaces a lawyer when you need one. But there are things every independent artist can do now.
- Turn on Artist Profile Protection on Spotify for Artists if you have access, and give your release key only to the distributor you trust.
- Check your profiles on every service a few times a year. Fans usually notice fakes first: make it easy for them to tell you.
- Register your artist name as a trademark: EUIPO covers every EU country in one application, the UK needs the IPO, the US the USPTO. It costs money and takes months. It turns "this is my name" from a claim into a document.
- Never pay for playlist placement you cannot trace to a real curator. That is how bot streams find innocent tracks.
- Choose a distributor that answers email. You will need it on the day something goes wrong.
Back to the room
Here is the part of my original argument I hold more firmly than before. I no longer believe digital distribution can carry a career on its own. Not because streaming is evil, but because every number it produces can now be faked: plays, listeners, followers, even the face on the profile.
What cannot be faked is a person in a room with other people. You cannot generate stage presence. You cannot stream a performance into existence with ten thousand bot accounts. Years of practice, an ear, the ability to read a room and change course in the middle of a set: these are the skills that become more valuable as the feeds fill with synthetic content. Many acts trending today were built to perform well for an algorithm. A career is built to hold up in front of people.
This summer I put that belief into practice. As Eric Oder I ran SOMA, an exhibition and festival in two halls of a former margarine factory in Berlin-Lichtenberg. Eleven days, entry by donation: an exhibition by day, live electronics, performance and rite by night, and workshops where people built their own electronics or took part in a sound ritual. None of it could be botted. Every person who came had to be there in body, and every connection made in those halls was between real people. That is the kind of audience no change to a royalty policy can take away.
That is not a rejection of technology. I use digital tools every day, and my music is on the platforms. The point is dependence. The artists who will last can use the platforms without being owned by them, and keep making music for rooms where people gather to be moved.
The fraud cases of the last two years are a test of whether streaming services can be fair marketplaces. They are slowly starting to pass parts of it. We should keep pushing them, and keep building the places they cannot reach.
This is an essay, not legal advice. If someone is using your name or your music, talk to a lawyer who knows intellectual property and platform law.
PS: Venus Theory published a video on this a few days after the first version of this piece. It is still one of the clearest breakdowns of the problem I have seen.
