Digital Déjà Vu: The Ad Fraud Playbook Hits the Music Industry

By Michael Nevins | Kick & Snare

Bad actors have a way of adapting to new models just as quickly as we build them. Throughout a long career in music and media tech, I've seen this cat-and-mouse game play out over and over again. The current challenges plaguing the digital music industry feel eerily familiar.

As digital streaming services have changed how we listen to and pay for music and media, a nasty pattern has emerged that closely mirrors the long-standing challenges of digital advertising: fraud.

Streaming fraud exploits the very systems designed to democratize access and streamline transactions. Just as MFA (Made For Advertising) websites, click farms, and botnets inflate impressions and video views and rip off both advertisers and web publishers in digital advertising, fake AI "artists" and artificial streams (AKA "botting") are now polluting DSPs (Digital Streaming Platforms. NB: In this case, not to be confused with advertising Demand Side Platforms.  

Fraudulent tactics in digital music warp rankings and quietly siphon earnings from authentic creators. Beyond the financial impact on artists, composers, and producers, this behavior erodes confidence in the integrity of streaming platforms and the data ecosystems the industry depends on.

The same motivations drive both streaming fraud and ad fraud: the pursuit of money. In music, this might involve hiring third-party "promotion" or "playlist" services (bots) to generate fake plays on Spotify or Apple Music. In advertising, it refers to simulating ad impressions, clicks, or conversions to trigger payouts. The bad actors in both cases are similar. They range from small-time operators gaming the system to organized networks running large-scale, cross-platform scams.

Of course, the same motivations plagued the music industry for decades when physical goods' retail sales numbers were easily manipulated or when bags of cash drove what got played on terrestrial radio. The tactics have evolved in tandem with tech advancements. Fraudsters utilize residential IP proxies, device emulators, and bots that mimic human behavior to evade detection. In streaming, they blend real and fake activity to avoid raising red flags. The goal is to generate royalties or inflate an artist's visibility, often as part of broader manipulation campaigns. Just like in ad tech, where "impressions, "viewability," and "engagement" are gamed to attract advertiser dollars, stream counts and playlist placements are distorted to boost music careers or scam royalties. 

The programmatic nature of both digital advertising and digital music creates an easy opportunity for exploitation. When revenue is distributed automatically based on volume-based metrics, the door is wide open for fraudsters. Scammers gonna scam.

So what?

From the ad tech world, we've learned that verification, transparency, and standards are crucial, but also present their own challenges. Third-party auditing and real-time monitoring are mainstream in the advertising tech industry. Still, these solutions have had unintended consequences, and at the very least, they add technical costs and friction to the ecosystem.    

The music industry is addressing fraud with initiatives like Beatdapp and Music Fights Fraud, aiming to establish similar layers of accountability and oversight for streaming services.

Detecting fraud is essential, but it's only one part of the issue.

If we want to fight fraud, we'll need a cultural shift that prioritizes quality over quantity. Artists, labels, and advertisers must recognize that raw metrics can be misleading and that meaningful engagement, fan loyalty, and brand trust are more challenging to fake than numbers on a dashboard. In this age of oversupply of limitless crappy content, authenticity and credibility become even more critical. The halo effect a brand receives from advertising in quality media matters. And if music labels are interested in long-term value derived from their investments in artists, then their authenticity also matters. As we've seen in recent weeks, it's relatively easy to create a fake "band" (The Velvet Sundown), with AI-created photos, an AI-created track (and composition) using Suno, to rack up hundreds of thousands of plays, earn a verified page, and more than 850,000 monthly listeners on Spotify.

Can DSPs like Spotify or Deezer address this issue? Can Third parties solve the problem? Is it even a problem? Do listeners care if their artists are fake or if they discovered a song due to manipulated charts? Especially for younger fans, the artists and music they listen to are potent cultural signifiers and an integral part of their identity. Music fans crave that strong connection with authentic artists.

In ad tech B2B players often have a disincentive to fix the fraud problem. But for the music industry, the risk and incentive to fix the problems should be much higher. Authenticity matters and music fans can be brutal when they lose faith. Remember Milli Vanilli? 

Let me know what you think.  I'm happy to hear from people in the music industry, music tech, ad tech, and anyone who enjoys music.