If you've received a notice from a streaming platform or your distributor that your music has been flagged for fraudulent or suspicious activity, this article is here to help explain a few things (and hopefully help avoid issues in the future).
It's quite common for "promotional services" to advertise themselves to artists and music labels, offering to help get the music in front of more listeners -- and drive up streams. Unfortunately, some of these promotional services are actually fraudulent: using bots or other schemes to "artificially" inflate plays.
Streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora work hard to detect these schemes automatically, and when they do find something amiss, 2 things can happen:
The platform may remove the song or entire release from their platform.
Any streams detected as fraudulent may not be paid out.
The reason streaming platforms take this so seriously is simple: streaming platforms pay out royalties based on how many streams their platform has received as a whole. So when one a "promotional service" artificially increases plays for one track, it takes money away unfairly from other artists on the platform. This violates the terms of services of the streaming platforms and is not allowed.
While an artist or label may not themselves have done anything wrong, they could have been scammed by a promotional service that did do something wrong. If you're an artist or label impacted by this, we recommend reviewing whom you worked with for the promotion of your music, as they may have been responsible for what happened. Report them to your distributor!
To avoid this from happening to your future releases, we strongly recommend not working with the same "promotional services" that led to your music getting flagged.