10 percent of music streams could be fake, at least according to a figure included in a recent report detailing the current state of streaming.
The article in question, penned by Anna Nicolaou for The Financial Times, focuses largely on Universal Music Group (UMG) and Deezer’s recently announced “artist-centric music streaming model.” As detailed in a press release earlier this month, UMG and the streaming platform will roll out the new model (which boosts “professional artists” with a minimum of 1,000 monthly streams) starting in France later this year.
A key issue in the collaboration is the presence on music streaming services of what UMG calls “non-artist noise content” and “a flood of uploads with no meaningful engagement,” with the general idea being that their proposed method could deter such uploads in the future.
In the FT piece, available in full here, JPMorgan analysts point to examples of people trying to “game the system” favored by Spotify and other major streamers. From there, executives are cited as estimating that “as much as 10 percent of all music streams are ‘fake,’” meaning they are the product of so-called “streaming farms.”
