Spotify and Amazon Music have partnered with independent distributors CD Baby, TuneCore and their respective parent companies Downtown and Believe, DistroKid, Symphonic, EMPIRE, UnitedMasters and Vydia to launch Music Fights, a global effort to fight music streaming fraud. Formed Fraud.
Streaming abuse, including bots, click farms, and scammers, is estimated to cost hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue annually, diluting royalty pools and reducing legitimate streaming revenues.
While each company says it has its own measures in place to deal with fraud, the creation of the Task Force will enable more efforts, he said.
“It is very important to Spotify’s mission that royalties are paid to legitimate artists for legitimate streams,” he said. Charlie Hellman, Vice President Global Head of Music Products at Spotify: “Artificial streaming is an industry-wide problem and we are encouraged by the collaboration of this new partnership.”
How MMF works
Members of Music Fights Fraud (MFF) focus on streaming fraud and manipulation and share information and best practices for detecting, mitigating and enforcing anti-fraud measures on a global scale. The alliance is also known as the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance (NCFTA), a non-profit partnership of private business, government and academia aimed at providing a neutral environment to identify and stop cybercrime. cooperate.
“The music industry is an ecosystem, and the Music Business Association has members from all sectors of the music industry, so we can see the impact of cheating on the ecosystem as a whole,” he said. . Portia Sabin, President of Industry group Music Biz. “We applaud Music Fights Fraud for working together to combat issues in this industry and look forward to supporting them in their future endeavors.”
More Alliance members will be announced soon.
Bruce Horton Founder and Editor of Hypebot, Senior Advisor at Bandsintown, President of Skyline Artists Agency, and Professor at Berklee College of Music.
