Has your music been taken down from Spotify or other streaming services recently? Here's why you should stay away from buying streams and instead focus on building an authentic following.
Written by Evie - Aug 18, 2021
Has your music been taken down from Spotify or other streaming services recently? There are many reasons why tracks are taken down and when this happens, you can of course reach out to our support team here (link to form), but a major reason why you might have experienced a takedown is due to fraudulent activity.
Spotify has now announced that they do not recommend third-party promotional services. Here’s what they had to say about paying for third-party promotional services.
At Amuse, our terms and conditions are in sync with the DSPs that we distribute to and the consequence of buying streams is a takedown of the track/s that have artificial streaming. We can see where a user's streams come from so it’s easily identifiable when we see suspicious behavior. On Spotify’s end, they have recently disclosed how they are dealing with this issue.
If any of this happened to you but you believe your streams were legitimately earned, please contact our support team here and we will review your case. We’ll work with the DSPs and hopefully resolve the problem quickly! But with a bit of investigation, we can easily identify fraudulent activities so be true to your work and your work will be true to you.
Spotify has taken measures to track bought streams and has been actively cleaning out the platform of releases that have artificial stream counts.
Most streaming services operate on a “shared pool” model for royalties, which splits all income according to the total number of streams accrued. When fraudulent users buy streams, it steals rightful revenue from other honest independent artists.
According to Rolling Stone, “three to four percent of global streams are illegitimate streams…That’s around $300 million in potential lost revenue moved from legitimate streams to illegitimate, illegal streams.” // To learn more about just how deeply this affects artists all over the world, check out the article here.
Focus on promoting your music authentically to your fans and believe in your music. Follow our blog for articles that give in-depth tips on promoting your music in a way that doesn’t break ours or the DSP’s terms and conditions. Find these articles here or check out our Youtube channel for more educational content that will help you build a following, grow your fan base and increase your streams organically.