If you are a new artist with big dreams and want your songs or videos to have millions of streams or views overnight to impress colleagues, fans and the media, don’t take the easiest step, which is ultimately the most dangerous, as well as illegal: hiring warehouses or bot farms to inflate the numbers.
By Carlos Passage (billboard colombia)
Streaming fraud (the artificial increase in views of a particular song or video) has been a controversial and delicate issue in the music industry in the last decade. Strategies to stop the problem increased in 2024 and will continue in 2025.
In addition to being ethically reprehensible, it is absolutely classified as a federal crime in the United States and is already beginning to be analyzed and adapted to the laws of several countries around the world to combat and eradicate it.
In September of last year, a North Carolina man was charged by federal prosecutors because he used Artificial Intelligence in the production of thousands of songs since 2017 and that by using bot farms in their distribution, he managed to collect more than 10 million dollars in fraudulent royalty payments on streaming platforms. This marked the first case of streaming fraud in the United States.

The anti-fraud fight is undoubtedly underway and the results are beginning to be seen. Many music business analysts agree that it bodes well for fighting crime that there has been a decrease in the average number of songs uploaded daily to DSPs (iTunes, Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, YouTube Music).
At one point in 2023, 120,000 tracks were sent to platforms every day. In 2024, that number dropped to 99,000.
Making and distributing music is easier today. There are an unprecedented number of tools out there (including easy-to-use digital audio workstations like BandLab and AI apps like Suno) and these are being exploited by the unscrupulous for global distribution and big money.
But it is the criminals, not the unwary artists, who are being hunted down with all their might. Amazon Music recently became the latest streaming service to test Universal Music Group’s new “Streaming 2.0” plan, which is designed, in part, to help prevent artificial streams.
Likewise, Spotify’s policy changes announced in 2023 to discourage distributors from uploading tracks using fraudulent strategies to inflate streaming platform activity at release have been highly successful.
Streaming fraud lawsuits using AI will not stop in 2025. In the war against fake and artificial consumption, new guardrails are expected to develop, but the problem is that the ‘bot’ bandits are also continuing to evolve.
4.9 trillion audio streams were produced in the United States last year and about 3.4 trillion in the rest of the world.
