Spotify Purged Tens of Thousands Of Tracks For ‘Fraudulent Streams’

Spotify has purged tens of thousands of tracks for allegedly using services that fraudulently inflate streams.

Music industry attorney Wallace Collins wrote in a blog post that the number of tracks purged by Spotify on January 1st could exceed 750,000.

“Upon information and belief, some 750,000 songs were removed, the vast majority of which appear to have used Distrokid for distribution,” wrote Collins. “It appears no major label artists have been affected nor has any major label music been taken down as part of this purge.”

Spotify regularly purges what that they detect as inflated streams by reducing the stream count or pulling that product off the service entirely. A source close to the situation said that this latest purge was in “the low ten thousands.” The source also disputed Wallace’s assertion that Spotify had singled out independent artists or DistroKid.

According to the Spotify FAQ,

“Any service that claims to offer guaranteed placement on playlists on Spotify in exchange for money are in violation of our terms & conditions, and they shouldn’t be used.”

Wallace says that his own clients only used “legitimate third party advertising and promotional services as opposed to ‘bots’ or other artificial means of generating increased streams.” Spotify encourages any artists who believe that their streams were earned authentically to contact their distributor or label who will contact the streamer to resolve the issue.

“We put significant engineering resources and research into detecting, mitigating, and removing artificial streaming activity on Spotify so that nothing stands in the way of our mission of giving artists the opportunity to live off their art, and so that rights holders are paid as fairly as possible for their work,” wrote Spotify. “The integrity of this is incredibly important to us because an illegitimate stream means there are honest, hard-working artists on the other side that are impacted.”