This year Spotify is ramping up the fight on what they call “artificial streaming”, and the message you may have received is part of that. Spotify has automated systems which do their best to detect “boosted” plays, this might include:

If you received a notification about this, Spotify is NOT necessarily directly or specifically accusing you of doing something wrong. However, their system HAS detected, to the best of its ability, that artificial plays have been detected on tracks by the artist(s) listed in the notification.

This can happen if a label manager, original artist, remixer, or someone related/associated with the track has worked with a promo/PR company that generated plays on a track that Spotify considers “artificial”.

We also understand you may not know if/when an artist/label manager on the release worked with a promo/PR company that generates plays in an “artificial” way. And if someone did, they might deny it because they’re embarrassed!

There are 2 help articles on Proton about this topic, to learn more:

After reading the above articles, you can potentially reach out to the artists that Spotify notified you about and start a discussion to see if they have any ideas what might have caused their music to get flagged.

If you do want to reach out to your artists, we’ve prepared an example letter here which you could read, review, and potentially customize before sending to them. Know that the artists, if they use Spotify for Artists, likely got this notification themselves too!

If you or your artists worked with a PR/promo company that got your music flagged, then we recommend NOT working with that company again, and you can also let Proton know the name of the company – so we can add them to the above article of PR/promo companies to avoid.

We understand this is an unpleasant and potentially frustrating situation to deal with, so please know Proton is here to help as best we can to help & answer questions.