Indie Distributors, Spotify & Amazon form Music Fights Fraud taskforce

Spotify and Amazon Music have joined forces with independent distributors CD Baby, TuneCore, their respective parent companies Downtown and Believe, DistroKid, Symphonic, EMPIRE, UnitedMasters, and Vydia to form Music Fights Fraud, a global effort to combat music streaming fraud.

It is estimated that streaming abuse including bots, click farms, and imposters account for hundreds of millions of dollars in lost income yearly and dilute the royalty pool and reduces revenue for legitimate streams

Each company says that have instituted their own measures to contend with fraud, but creating this task force allows them to do more.

“It is critical to the Spotify mission that royalties are paid to legitimate artists for legitimate streams.” said Charlie Hellman, VP, Global Head of Music Product, Spotify: “Artificial streaming is an industry-wide issue, and we are encouraged by the collaboration of this new alliance.”

How MMF works

Music Fights Fraud (MFF) members will share information and best practices to detect, mitigate, and enforce anti-fraud measures on a global scale with a focus on streaming fraud and manipulation. The alliance will also work with the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance (NCFTA), a nonprofit partnership of private companies, government, and academia designed to provide a neutral environment to identify and disrupt cybercrime.

“The music industry is an ecosystem, and the Music Business Association has members from all sectors of the music industry, allowing us to see the effect of fraud on the ecosystem as a whole,” said Portia Sabin, President of trade group Music Biz. “We applaud Music Fights Fraud for working together to combat this industry issue and we look forward to supporting their efforts moving forward.”

More alliance members are exoected to be announced soon.

Bruce Houghton is the Founder and Editor of Hypebot, a Senior Advisor at Bandsintown, President of the Skyline Artists Agency, and a Berklee College Of Music professor.