Since 2024, Spotify is the first music platform to apply fines for artificial streaming. These fines arrive every month to distributors in the sales reports, and distributors pass this charge to users that distributed violating tracks where there are extremely high levels of artificial streaming.
📖 Read more:
All you need to know about Artificial Streaming | Spotify for Artists Blog
It’s important to note that these penalties will only apply to releases that show evidence of artificial streams, ensuring that those who do not engage in purchasing streams are not unfairly impacted.
Once Random Sounds receives the list of tracks fined for artificial streaming, the following happens:
1 - Balance Debit
The fine is debited from the user's balance. That is, if the user had a balance of 50 USD and receives a fine of 20 USD, the balance will remain at 30 USD.
Important: If the fine exceeds the amount of the user's balance, the balance will be negative.
Example: User balance: 5 USD, Fine for artificial streaming: 10 USD = User balance: -5 USD
2 - Takedown of the Releases involved
Random Sounds' system will automatically take down releases involved in artificial streaming from all digital platforms.
3 - Block of UPC, ISRC and Tracks in the Random Sounds system
Both the UPC codes, ISRC codes and fingerprints of the tracks marked as violating artificial streaming will be automatically added to the Random Sounds block list.
These can no longer be distributed through our system under any circumstances.
4 - Alert in the Spotify system
Spotify will flag UPC codes, ISRC codes, artist names and label names as previously involved in artificial streaming cases.
Spotify may permanently block these at its own discretion, regardless of which distributor is used to distribute them.
5 - User Suspension on Random Sounds (optional)
Depending on the severity of the case, Random Sounds reserves the right to permanently ban the user and cancel the Digital Music Distribution Agreement, thus taking down the entire catalog distributed by the user through Random Sounds.