Music distributors use data analytics to handle artificial streaming fraud

Challenges

The battle of royalty & fake music streams 

Fraudulent music streams is one of the pressing concerns every music platform faces. An artificial or fraudulent stream is a glaring increase of a musical album stream picked up by the streaming service. It’s usually done by artists partnering with fraud bot services to spike the stream count of a song and hijack its royalties. 

Spotify indeed puts in a great effort to winnow out these albums, notifying respective distributors through monthly reports—encouraging them to take actions against the song owner.

Our client is one such popular distributor from the US who receives monthly reports from Spotify. Their job is to help musicians and independent artists get their music out there. When they receive fraudulent reports like this, they need to make decisions promptly, comparing artists’ stream records and releases across multiple music platforms.

Our client, who is already disincentivized by the music platform, should now make an informed decision—something that would establish fairness for other legitimate artists. They don’t want to remove artists' accounts with artificial streams right away. And how we helped them forms the rest of the story. 

Solution from datakulture

Identifying Data analysis for decision support

Upon analyzing their requirements, we suggested to them a periodic detailed descriptive analysis report on artists' streams and albums to call the shots. A report that would help them make either one of the following decisions for reported artificial streams. 

• Let them go off with a warning

• Penalizing them by withholding their royalties

• Take down their account and music labels across platforms upon recurrent artificial strikes.

We built a dashboard that reflects the following information for the penalized accounts dashboard we made with Tableau, combining Spotify reports with other general streaming data.

• Total penalized accounts, their region, plan type, royalty earned, and more.

• Total number of artificial and legitimate streams.

• Top 100 accounts with artificial streams along with respective albums, count, and more. To examine further, they could click on each account, view all relevant stats. Visual cues do its part, demonstrating peaks and troughs on streams, so the decision-maker can easily observe the suspicious activity. 

Our agile nature also spurred them to make prompt decisions, as they could visualize the moment the new data walks in. 

The reports eased their burden of having to perform in-depth analysis into each artist's records and brought everything into one view. They could make fair and unbiased comparisons, given all the current and historical streams, number of published albums, and revenue earned—benefiting all involved. 

Conclusion

With the increasing number of music platforms taking a stand against flagrant artificial streaming, inevitably, the data analysis and the complexity of decision-making will experience a sharp upward trajectory. While there are strong technological solutions on the rise, timely and informed decision-making skills are a prerequisite to tackle hoaxes in the music industry.

Armed with clever descriptive analysis and visualization, our client is all set with a clear workflow and ensures continuous monitoring of artificial streams. This way, they could retain legitimate customers while maintaining reputation across different platforms.

• Customer retention through subscription renewal tracking reports

• Achieve customer retention through subscription renewal tracking reports