Fraudsters are using click farms and AI music to make ‘significant’ sums of money off streaming giants like Spotify.Tech Correspondent Jess Kelly said the scam is becoming more and more common – with around 10% of all streams now believed to be fraudulent.
She warned that smaller artists are the ones losing out to the scam, with the click farms cutting into the attention they might otherwise get.“Fraudsters are creating music with AI, uploading it to streaming platforms, playing it on repeated streams and then taking the revenue,” she said.“You might get US $0.001 but if you’re getting millions of streams, that’s when you start to make money.
“New research has shown that around 10% of all streams on streaming services are fraudulent,” Jess said.The scam is similar to so-called ‘click farms’, in which companies use bots to increase the number of page views for their website.“It does work and we are seeing it more and more. “Unfortunately, there is a victim here and that is the smaller artists who are not getting the same level of attention on these platforms.”
Streaming companies are looking to crack down on the phenomenon but Jess said it will be difficult for them to do so.“That is a very difficult thing to do if you think of all the artists in the world.In the past three years, YouTube has paid out $70 billion in fees to content creators.