A report commissioned by the Ministry of Culture points to a manipulation of the number of online listenings on streaming platforms such as Spotify or Deezer, reveals “Le Parisien”. In 2021, between one and three billion false listenings were detected in France.
What if artists didn’t actually have the success they claim to have? A report by the National Music Center (CNM), commissioned by the Minister of Culture Roselyne Bachelot in 2021 and consulted by The Parisianreveals that a massive scam is affecting the streaming industry, and that a significant part of online listening is actually fake listening.
This 57-page document was produced in collaboration with three streaming platforms, namely Deezer, Spotify and Qobuz. The result of a year-and-a-half-long investigation, it has just been unveiled to around forty representatives of the record industry, and reveals one to three billion false listenings over the year 2021 (on 100 billion songs listened to each year in France).
“A fraud that distorts the remuneration of artists”
The three companies, which all three fight against these scams, revealed to the ministry the number of false plays they detected on their platforms: in 2021, these amounted to 2.6% on Deezer, 1.1% on Spotify and 1.6% on Qobuz. And the practice developed the following year, since the figure rose to 5% in 2022 on Deezer.
“To our knowledge, this is the first time in the world that an official study has shown that there is fraud in streaming”, underlines the president of the CNM, Jean-Philippe Thiellay, who nevertheless qualifies by recalling that “we are far from the 10% we have often heard about”.
Philippe Thiellay considers this “massive” fraud “worrying”, especially since it “distorts the remuneration of artists”. Finally, he regrets that “not everyone played the game, given the high stakes”. “Amazon Music gave us 2022 numbers and Apple Music and YouTube didn’t participate at all.”
The most popular artists not the most concerned
Finally, the investigation shows that this fraud is exercised on the internet via real sellers of fake streams, which are difficult to condemn and therefore to close. The Parisian describes “dozens of networked computers that run titles on a loop on fake accounts opened with expired or stolen credit cards”. Viruses would also be used to take over computers and launch songs on the platforms to inflate the numbers.
The National Music Center also claims that false listening detected did not concern the most popular artists, contrary to what one might think. In the top 10 most listened to songs, only 0.25% plays would be false on Spotify and 0.65% on Deezer.
