How Amuse’s Distro Team Built the Market’s Fastest DIY Distribution and Cut Artificial Streams by 70%

💡 Here’s how we did it

About a year ago, alarms went off in the music industry. Artificial streaming had escalated into a major industry threat, taking revenue away from real artists and undermining trust in the ecosystem. If you ask me, the digitalization of music has changed the game for the better: removing industry gatekeepers, opening up global reach and empowering more artists to build careers on their own terms. But with a more open and accessible landscape comes new vulnerabilities and a growing risk of abuse.

From a Chief Product Officer perspective, the challenge was clear: how could we combat fraud without slowing things down? How do you protect the ecosystem and make digital music distribution more efficient?

Every time we performed artist surveys they reinforced a key insight: fast release times were one of the most valued features. This might seem counterintuitive – after all, a successful launch is often built on months of pre-save campaigns, marketing, playlist pitching, press releases, and social media strategy. While that still holds true for many, today’s digital-first artists expect an experience as seamless as uploading a video to TikTok or Instagram.

🤯 So, how do you go about heavily reducing streaming fraud while at the same time reducing your release lead times? I can tell you that it’s not the easiest thing to balance.

To reduce the lead times, one tempting (and common?) approach would have been to loosen our review process. As this would let more stream fraudsters slip through, lowering our strict review policies was obviously not an option for us. Instead, we decided to go for a holistic solution: a combination of automation, greater transparency for users, and tougher fraud prevention measures.

At Amuse, we began building our own distribution supply chain back in 2017, meaning we don’t rely on third-party pipelines to deliver the tens of thousands of releases we distribute each month. Our dedicated product team works hands-on every day to develop and refine our platform, using the latest technology to create a fast, reliable, and user-friendly experience for artists. Being in charge of our own digital music distribution supply chain enabled us to develop two key initiatives: Stream Check and Robocop (the latter a nod to the classic movie Robocop, as well as a play on automating the processes of our Content Operations team aka COPS).

✔️ Stream Check – Building a fairer music ecosystem

Stream Check was launched in early summer 2024 to tackle a key issue: artificial streaming isn’t always an intentional act by users. While some bad actors actively try to exploit the system – something our fraud team constantly battles – many artists unknowingly fall into the trap. They might pitch to the wrong playlists or pay for “marketing services” that promise exposure but, in reality, rely on fraudulent streaming farms.

We saw transparency as the best solution. Instead of just punishing unassuming artists and management teams after the fact, we built a dashboard that gives artists real-time insights into their streaming activity. This allows them to spot suspicious patterns early, take action before they get penalized, and make informed decisions about their promotion strategies. By putting this control directly in their hands, Stream Check helps honest artists protect their releases while reinforcing a fairer music ecosystem.

✔️ Robocop – High level automated content review

Robocop was designed to automate our content review process at a high level, enabling us to approve or provide feedback on releases at an unprecedented speed. In fact, we’ve already processed 50,000 releases in under a minute – all while maintaining one of the highest industry standards for release quality. The approach to building Robocop was pragmatic, almost like an R&D project. We first compiled all streaming service guidelines and our internal content operations processes, ranking them based on two key factors: how often they were violated and how much time our agents spent reviewing them. Then, we systematically tackled each guideline, ensuring that any automation we introduced matched the accuracy of a content operations agent.

The review process focused on four main areas: audio, cover art, metadata, and rights. Throughout 2024, we rolled out automated checks iteratively – starting with simple if-statements and third-party tools, and gradually incorporating more advanced machine learning. By the end of the year, we had automated the review of all major areas, allowing us to process roughly half of all approvals and rejections automatically – a massive leap forward in efficiency and scalability.

🤝 The results were significant

The introduction of Stream Check - in combination with us collaborating closely with Spotify to enforce their processes against artificial streaming - led to a 70 % decrease of streams deemed artificial by Spotify between Q1 and Q4 of 2024.

Meanwhile, a year ago, a subscriber on our lowest tier had to wait an average of 9 days for their release to be reviewed for the first time. Today, that wait time has been reduced to just 14 hours – a 93% decrease – thanks to Robocop. This efficiency has allowed us to significantly reduce the size of our outsourced manual review team and reallocate those resources to other critical areas of our business, further enhancing the user experience.

The music industry we’re striving for is one that’s democratized, flexible, transparent, and free from stream farming – while maintaining high-quality, instant release times for artists who want them. While we’re always exploring new ways to improve, we’ve just taken another major step in that direction.