Illegitimate Streaming Practices Siphon Millions from Artists, CNM Report Reveals

Ava Irving, Staff Reporter -

A recent report by CNM has shined a spotight on the prevalence of illegitimate streaming practices in the French music industry. 

The report suggests that at least 1%-3% of music streams in the country are fraudulent and generated through paid-for stream farms. These streams are generated by "bad actors" who want to siphon royalty money away from legitimate artists.

The CNM study analyzed a vast set of data provided by Spotify, Deezer, and Qobuz, as well as a panel of distributors, including Universal, Sony, Warner, Believe, and Wagram. 

The study found that music distributed by these companies represented more than 90% of the top 10,000 most listened-to titles on Spotify and more than 75% of the overall volume of streams on Deezer.

The report estimates that between 1 billion and 3 billion streams in France in 2021 were fraudulent. If we apply this threshold to wider industry value figures, the streaming fraud problem becomes clear. 

The French music market in 2021 generated EUR €492 million (USD $581.5m) in streaming revenues annually, and 1% of that figure would be €4.92 million ($5.8m), while 3% would be €14.76 million ($17.4m). 

If we apply the same figures globally, one percent would be $169 million, and three percent would be over half a billion dollars.

It is worth noting that the CNM report only considered fraudulent streams detected by the platforms and eliminated from the sharing of royalties. The actual number of fraudulent streams may be much bigger than the reported figure.

The study also found that hip-hop/rap music represented 84.5% of fraudulent streams detected among Spotify's top 10,000 tracks during 2021. 

This is to be expected since hip-hop is the dominant genre in the French market. However, compared to the total number of streams generated by hip-hop and rap in 2021, fraudulent streams represented a small share of the genre's total listens, with a 0.4% share on Spotify and 0.7% on Deezer.

The study claims that the market share of streams detected as fraudulent on total plays of other specific genres was significantly higher for the likes of background music (4.8% on Deezer) and 'non-musical titles' (3.5%).

The CNM has called out Amazon Music, YouTube, and Apple Music for declining to participate or supply data for the study. These platforms were "unable or unwilling to share their data according to the defined observation perimeter, despite all the guarantees of confidentiality that the CNM provided them."

This report highlights the need for the music industry to take a more proactive approach to tackling fraudulent streaming practices. Legitimate artists deserve to be compensated fairly for their hard work, and it is the responsibility of music platforms and distributors to ensure that they are not being ripped off by "bad actors."

 Let's hope that this report will serve as a wake-up call to the industry to take action against fraudulent streaming practices.