Topic
Paying a promoter for guaranteed streams or playlist spots is against Spotify's terms, and the penalties land on the artist: lost royalties, removed tracks and a per-track fee your distributor passes on. Here is how Spotify defines artificial streaming, what TuneCore, CD Baby and DistroKid do when a track is flagged, how to spot a scam, and what to do if you get a notice.
Workflows
Spotify now calls its 1,000-stream royalty threshold a "first line of defense" against AI-generated tracks, which it says are 10 times more likely to fall below it. The same rule decides whether a new human artist earns anything, and Spotify still keeps one of its two tests secret.
Industryvia Spotify Newsroom
Deezer will let listeners hide fully AI-generated music from search before the end of 2026. Its own figures matter more than the toggle. Deezer receives nearly 90,000 fully AI tracks a day, yet they draw only 1-3% of streams, and up to 85% of those streams in 2025 were fraudulent. For human artists, the fix that counts is in the payout system, not the search bar.
Industryvia Deezer Newsroom
Michael Smith, who used AI-generated songs and bot accounts to drain streaming royalty pools, was sentenced to 18 months and ordered to forfeit about 8.09 million dollars. The next day the US Copyright Office published a public inquiry into streaming fraud, with comments due 23 Nov 2026. For artists it is the first official place to put on record what fraud costs them.
Industryvia U.S. Copyright Office, Federal Register
Sub-Saharan Africa's recorded music revenues grew 15.2% in 2025 to $120 million, and digital income grew faster still. But South Africa takes 78.1% of that, collecting societies across the continent took in only €90 million in 2024, and nobody publishes fraud rates for African markets. For African artists the growth is real; the plumbing that turns plays into payments is not keeping up.
Industryvia IFPI
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