Spotify's Artificial Streaming Fines Are CRAZY

Just another brilliant Spotify idea to not pay artists.
2 years ago the 1000 streams cap, now this. What will 2026 bring?

Spotify are utterly toxic. I wouldn't be surprised if they're doing this themselves.

What's even scarier is you guys are surprised by any of this! Spotify is not trying to pay you, they are not there to help you, they are there to make as much money as possible by any means possible. It's like you guys are gambling in a casino and loosing and wanna go to the mob boss and complain it's not fair. How about simply just leave.

Just wait till AI music takes over. I follow Reddit pages where people are using Suno to release 27 albums a year…. It’s disgusting.

it just happened to one of me 5 days ago .... i stumble on this video looking for a reason why?? because all my songs and artist songs are legit....thanks for letting me know. thanks for the info

I still don’t understand how every artist puts Spotify first. You do adds, and redirect listeners from social media to Spotify, you help them and they screw you over. Why not putting the effort to Apple Music or Deezer etc ? Or YouTube. The more we support them, the more they get free adds and the more they screw independant artists over. It’s up to each individual to stop this and put the focus elsewhere. I personally generate way more streams on YouTube than Spotify, and all naturally, without playlisting or paying for adds. The YT algorythm recommends my songs to new listeners

estão me roubando assim

Happened to me on a few of my projects and one of my project got taken down. I ended up re uploading it but lost most of my previous streams prior.

yeh we got a notification they will be charging us $10 due to a track that 'might' have been streamed. Think it must have landed on a botted playlist. May force us to just remove the release.

So you need to do marketing to have chance on spotify, but as soon as you do these bot services see you need marketing and are not effective at it. So they put you on a Distrokid x Theircompany 7 Day Free promo List to get your attention, and then you get a mail you were on a bot playlist and i did just reply i did the Distrokid Wheel of Playlist. Songs still there, no idea if i was fined, that will probably mean i will never earn any money, cause so far i have never reached 1000 plays on a song and will be in the negative.

Spotify's behavior in these cases is rather strange. I wouldn't be surprised if some labels or artists do this simply to avoid emerging competition.

My song is in hindi and I got added to a bot playlist which is in english.. I contacted spotify and my music distributor and they both told me to basically f** off as they cant do anything. Now I have a warning on my account stating spotify has removed artificial steams. Not sure what to do. ITs a funny situation. looks like my artist carrier is heading in negative direction without a start. Not sure when I will get removed from that bot list or if I will ever get removed. Any suggestions ?

Why even read this outloud?? I'm going around spoti et al. You wanna tag along & sell the new Rev Model or you gona keep whipping a dead horse til it tastes like... fake chicken?
'FORWARD! THEY CRIED from the Front & the Rear; diiiiiiiiiy-ing...' Not me, hehe-hehe-hehee! Coming along, anyone? :)

There’s something that should be done to stop this!!!!

Once again f stpotify😪😪😪

Helping Shareholders > Helping Small Artists.. according to Spotify

Labels can… we don’t… how you call that?

This happened to me twice in a month. I’m a new artist just starting out and this has been so disheartening. I’ve asked Spotify how they determine the streams are from bots and they literally said they can’t disclose their methods. I feel like Spotify are the ones adding songs to botted playlists.

Happened to me a few times and I decided to fight it with my distributor and got all the fines refunded.
Also had a convo with the Spotify for Artists team and they agree that it's not the best solution. Now hope they change the process

I think Spotify should just find a simple way to cancel out this kind of spike in streams with some calculations they could easily do. Like, if there’s such an obvious peak, they could just ignore that day’s data and take an average of the three days before and after instead and just flag that day as “anomalous” with a note saying this adjustment was made

Spotify bot streams new artists

I have a few big songs and I'm not worried about them. But I find that the more famous you are, the more you're gonna be under attack like this. And I also have released that get less than 1k streams per year. I got 700 artificial streams on one of them and I'm considering taking it down from Spotify myself, cause I don't want them to pull the album, that's making me money, because of 1 songs nobody listens to.

Wow, that’s an insanely high number. So far, I’ve only heard of cases with around 1–2k a day and thought that having a few hundred active listeners already put you in a relatively safe zone, but this scale is really unsettling.

Yup, had one of my projects added to a random playlist and it ended with me having 100+ tracks removed a few
Months ago….. TuneCore nor Spotify had an answer or would help…. Honestly could just be Spotify not wanting to send a few $100 to a few thousand small artist…..

They never really loved the artists as they we're not founded as a music streaming platform in the beginning (but more of an ad system). This is just one way their mindset shows.

This is out of hand. Back in June I got hit with $11 in fines then was credited it back in August. No email. No notice. I only saw it because I was looking at my quarterly reports from my distributor. Glad I got it back but I thought Spotify had “an army of AI anti bots” removing spam accounts? 🤦‍♂️

I got robbed for over 4.3 million real streams ...the music industry is a scam..Major artist are using bots....while indide artist are threw in the mix and they are purposely botting indie people accounts to take yhem out..i have all the proof

The explanation for this has been provided elsewhere on the channel. With 80% of fake streams aparently generated by organised crime/money laundering. Spotify's focus is on that, not fake streams as they impact small & medium artists or seemingly blatent fakery by major artists.

Wonder how much $$$ they are making from pulling our music. I’d actually make more money pulling all my music from Spotify because I won’t have to pay random penalties for a crime I didn’t commit. Keep up the good work Andrew and happy Halloween!

this happened to me, someone added my song Star to a bot playlist and now it says i have fake streams which wasnt even my choice to have that song put on there

The only way to combat the scummy nature of Wankify……is to Stop feeding it……it’s vile.

This is a huge freakin' scandal. Once your music is out on the streaming platforms, you cannot control who puts it on any playlist, using bots or not. So you cannot be responsible for it. Also, what about being innocent until proven guilty? Where is the "court" to decide based on evidence who is responsible? How can the streaming platforms steal your royalties when you are not responsible for the problem - if anything they are. We have to rise up! The artists provide the value that is monetized, and then the platforms fine the artists who didn't do anything wrong. Disgusting.

Hi. Got pulled from TuneCore and fined (whole album), didn't do anything of the scam sort. Changed distributor. If you want to look into famous (at this point) cases of this, check - Karra (whole album nuked, Distrokid), Venus Theory made a lengthy video about this (TuneCore pulled 23 albums of one artist)... Anyway... I'm counting on improvements on Spotify's end for this BS, since they at least did some good platform changes lately. My view - don't write anything keyword sensitive in your artist bio, don't add links or anything at all, cause bots and AI's scrape profile descriptions for potential scam targets. Had music released for 7'ish years, and this happened when I started messing with the description. But of course I also think this can happen for other reasons.

spotify remain the scummiest company on earth

Same email 2 days ago

this happened to me Ditto took no action to help me even after filing a full report of evidence that the whole situation was out of my control