Streaming Services Could Have Been Spared 1M Slop Tracks Over The Last Three Months If Amuse’s Proactive Filtering Was Industry Standard

by Giorgio D'Ambrosio, CEO of Amuse

The last few week’s headlines around DIY distribution won’t need repetition here. What’s worth talking about is what it reveals, which is a question that the DIY distribution sector has spent years avoiding. What does it actually mean to call yourself an “open” platform?

Too often, the answer has been: open to anyone who pays a subscription fee, no questions asked. That’s not a neutral stance, it’s a business model. One that treats every upload the same, whether it comes from an artist building a career or a bad actor trying to exploit the platform for streaming fraud. That’s a model that scales revenue faster than it scales responsibility.

This isn’t the first time a large open distributor is being exposed to exactly this kind of question. It’s becoming a pattern. Patterns are usually a sign that something structural needs fixing, rather than just one company.

As a distributor in this market, Amuse has a unique incentive to do well in related matters, because of how our business is structured. Based on extrapolation of data from our own platform, we estimate that the DSPs would have been saved at least 1 million tracks just over the past three months if other large open distributors applied the same spam policies as we do.

For those who don’t know, Amuse runs a two-tiered model: open, self-service distribution alongside our Artist & Label Services division, a tailored, partnership-based offering for growing, independent artists and labels looking for an alternative to the traditional infrastructure. With its distribution-level data feed, the self-service platform also acts as a scouting ground for those Artist & Labels Services partnerships, which means licensing, not subscription volume, makes up the majority of our revenue. We have a direct incentive to keep quality high on the open side of the platform, as it’s the pipeline for the other.

Not every distributor is built this way. Some are optimizing for one thing: subscription growth from whoever’s paying, regardless of what they’re uploading.

Low Barriers Don’t Mean No Standards

Approaching Amuse’s 10 year anniversary, I sometimes reminisce about the early days when our founding belief was seen as far-fetched: that the next generation of successful artists would emerge straight from the self-releasing sector, not despite it, and that there would no longer be a blueprint or definition of what success looks like.

Today, those are established truths, and despite having stayed more under the radar than some peers, we’ve grown into a top 3 international distributor when it comes to release volume.

Keeping the barrier to entry low for independent artists and labels is core to what we and many other modern music businesses do, and it should stay that way to further promote the innovation and redistribution of power to artists and small labels that we’ve seen throughout the past few years. But low barriers to entry are not the same as no quality control. An open platform can still ask: who is releasing this, do they hold the rights, is this something a real person is standing behind.

Our review process is built around that distinction. Every release from a new user of our self-service platform goes through human quality assessment, supported by software we built in-house to keep that review as efficient as possible. Releases can still clear in less than 24 hours when an account passes all of our checkpoints. We also cap how much music a single account can upload in given windows – in hours, days and weeks – specifically to make the platform a less useful tool for anyone trying to mass-produce content rather than release music. We’ve clearly seen that this simple effort deters actors who have tried to use our platform for fraudulent purposes.

Fraud Prevention Demands Daily Dedication

We set up an in-house anti-fraud team already in 2019, years before this became an industry-wide conversation. That team reviews DSP data daily, looking for the kind of suspicious patterns: repeat aliases, suspicious personal metadata, coordinated streaming activity and impersonation attempts that a platform optimizing purely for subscription growth has little incentive to look for. In combination with important efforts made by big DSPs in 2025, that work helped us reduce artificial streams on our platform by 70%, while we simultaneously grew and cut our average release times by 93%. Speed and scrutiny aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s not impossible, just more demanding, to run them together.

There’s No Silver Bullet

None of this makes Amuse immune to bad actors. No platform operating at scale is. Content will occasionally slip through, and we don’t pretend otherwise. What really matters is having a plan for catching it and acting fast when it does. We maintain an internal as well as external flagging system for problematic content and an artist-profile watchlist that alerts our team when new accounts try to release under questionable names or aliases. 

It’s not a perfect system but a maintained one. Caring about these things is, and will only become more, essential to not only digital distribution but the music industry at large. So, if you’re a customer of the distribution category, make sure to ask your distributor if they’re primarily a part of the problem or the solution. We know for a fact, that if they wanted to, they could.