Apple talks music fraud: ‘On Apple Music less than 1% of streams are manipulated’

This is news coverage of Music Ally Connect – our international music business conference that is taking place 20–21 January 2025 in London.

Streaming fraud has been an increasingly prominent issue within the music industry over the past two years, as more information has emerged on scams and the techniques used to cary them out.

We have seen global body the IFPI working with its regional members and police to target services and sites offering to artificially boost streams.

We have seen a crackdown on fraudulent streams become a key part of ‘artist-centric’ changes by streaming services including Deezer and Spotify – the latter of which was reportedly targeted by criminal gangs with their money-laundering activities.

Last year, we saw a Danish man jailed in a case that saw him accused of making $635k from fraudulent streams, while an even bigger ongoing case in the US involves a defendant accused of making more than $10m by creating a huge amount of AI-generated music then inflating its streams using bots.

Shortly after the details of that case emerged, Spotify announced that its payouts only accounted for around $60k of the $10m+ royalties generated in that case – essentially saying its anti-fraud policies had worked well, and implying that rivals’ hadn’t.

Today, one of those rivals went public with its own data and opinions on streaming fraud: Apple Music.

Its global head of music partnerships and business programmes, Bryce McLaughlin, gave a keynote presentation at our Music Ally Connect conference in London to discuss how Apple Music tackles music fraud and stream manipulation.

“This is a really important topic for the industry today. It’s not a new topic for us at Apple Music: it’s something we’ve been focused on for many years… but it’s something we haven’t talked about publicly. We’re going to change that today,” said McLaughlin.

“I want to get a common question out of the way. How big is stream manipulation on Apple Music? Well, on Apple Music, less than 1% of all streams are manipulated. And in fact, that number is well below 1%. It generally sits at about 0.3% of global streams.”

“This isn’t by accident or coincidence. Stream manipulation on Apple Music is small because we’ve been actively focused on this issue for years,” he continued.

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However, McLaughlin pointed out that for some distributors providing music to the service, that percentage is much higher. He showed an anonymised pie chart for one distributor.

“Streams from one label represented 90% of their streams in some regions, and 98% of those streams were manipulated,” he said. “So even though this is a comparatively small issue for our service, it’s still really important.”

McLaughlin explained the two primary motivations behind streaming manipulation. First, people doing it for financial gain: royalties. Second, people doing it for “perceived popularity” – for example to rank higher in the charts or “to leverage those ill-gotten plays into something bigger, like a record deal or [on tour] a larger venue”.

McLaughlin also described the two main ways that stream manipulation is carried out: through programmatic means and through deception.

“When you think about stream manipulation, you probably imagine a dark room filled with hundreds of devices silently generating hundreds of millions of streams and siphoning royalties away from legitimate artists,” he said.

“That’s programmatic manipulation, and it’s the most obvious and publicised form of stream manipulation… Streams are created using scripts running on devices, using fake or stolen accounts. There’s no human being listening to the music.”

However, that’s just the first of the two methods, with the other being deception.

“Deceptive content can take many forms. It can appear as deceptive cover artwork, it can appear as deceptive metadata, it can even be deceptive audio. But in all cases, the content is attempting to appear as something legitimate. More often than not, something popular,” said McLaughlin.

Deceptive music can show up in various places, for example in search results when fans search for an artist, album or song, or by tricking algorithms into recommending it to listeners.

“The purpose of this content is to generate streams by deceiving fans, rather than through programmatic means. It manipulates customers and services to generate real plays by human beings,” he said.

“But even though these plays are genuine plays – that is, they’re plays created by a real person – we still consider them a form of manipulation, because the customer was manipulated.”

McLaughlin moved on to talk about how music makes its way onto services like Apple Music.

“A small content provider like an independent label may work with a handful of artists and know them all personally, while a large content provider like a music distribution company might work for millions of artists that have no personal connection with them. And this is where the manipulation starts,” he said.

“Because manipulation can’t occur without content, any first line of defence begins at the point of distribution. Content providers have a responsibility to ensure the content that they distribute is legitimate content from legitimate artists,” added McLaughlin. “Most content providers do this and do it well.”

Among the things they do is verifying accounting and other information from the providers of their music; cross-checking music before uploading it to streaming services; and monitoring their analytics for plays of that music, with Apple Music providing several tools to help with this.

“When content providers use these tools and lean into the problem, we actually see them improve,” said McLaughlin, showing another anonymised chart of an individual provider’s data.

“9% of their streams were manipulated. Within six months of working with this content provider, and more importantly, the content provider taking action, manipulated streams dropped to less than 1% of [their] global streams on Apple Music,” he said.

Streaming services must play their role too, however. Apple Music calculates and pays royalties out on a monthly basis, but it updates its charts on a weekly, daily and even three-hourly basis, which governs its approach.

“In order to ensure the bad actors don’t benefit from manipulation, we have to identify and remove streams that have been manipulated in near-real-time. It’s the only way to ensure that the information used to create charts is unaffected by manipulation,” he said.

McLaughlin noted that Apple has been dealing with music fraud since the heyday of its iTunes download store, and with stream manipulation since it launched Apple Music in 2015.

“But about three years ago, we saw a change in the intensity of manipulation, and we began to think about how to evolve our approach,” he said.

That approach currently includes a team around the world “providing 24/7 coverage” and, since the autumn of 2022, a new program focused on identifying and preventing manipulation.

“We do three things. First, we exclude manipulated streams in near-real-time. Second, we provide clear reporting to content providers and official chart companies as well as to artists and their teams. And third, we take down content when appropriate, said McLaughlin.

“It’s important to know that we have a rigorous process in place and only remove content after several reviews of our moderation team. We only take down content when absolutely necessary, like when content has no reason for being available in the service other than for manipulation.”

Apple Music also operates a stream-review system where manipulated streams can be quickly flagged and reviewed in order to ensure that Apple’s charts, the data it provides daily to official chart companies, and the monthly royalty calculations are clean.

“Identifying and removing manipulation in real time isn’t easy to do, but it’s incredibly important to addressing the two motivations of financial gain and perceived popularity, and it’s something that we believe every music service should do,” he said.

“If manipulated streams never get paid out or included in the charts, the bad actors simply lose the motivation to manipulate.”

Apple’s content-provider partners receive daily reports on all streams flagged for manipulation and review, accompanied by encouragement to use its tools to monitor themselves.

“Music services and content providers both need to play an active part, and it can’t just be some content providers. It needs to be every content provider leaning in,” he said.

“This is because bad actors are constantly probing for weaknesses. If they distribute content through one content provider and get caught, then they move to another distributor and try again, and if that content provider does not have systems in place to prevent stream manipulation, that that actor could continue to upload and manipulate content.”

“When we began meeting with our content provider partners about the evolution of our approach a couple of years ago, it became clear that there were those who were leaning into the issue and working to develop thoughtful solutions, and there were those who were simply not focused on stream manipulation at all,” he continued.

That was when Apple Music introduced what McLaughlin described as “incentives” – financial penalties for distributors who do not take action to tackle the problem.

“A financial adjustment framework that only impacts labels and distributors that consistently operate with a high level of stream manipulation,” was how he put it.

These adjustments are proportional to the attempted royalty gain, and are deducted from the royalties paid to that provider, gradually increasing over time if they do not improve – although there is a one-month grace period initially with no adjustment applied, enabling them to take action.

“It’s only if the label or distributor does not take action to reduce manipulation of content that they deliver that we then apply a financial adjustment,” said McLaughlin.

“This is actually really successful. When we began applying the adjustment framework, we found that providers began to step up… those content providers that have historically not taken the topic seriously and not made the investment… are beginning to lean in and change, and that’s really good.”

He offered some metrics for this success by way of conclusion.

“Within the first six months of introducing the new program, manipulated streams dropped by 30%, and we saw another 20% reduction within the first three months following a subsequent update,” said McLaughlin.

“We’ve also seen more than half of content providers with moderate-to-significant stream manipulation improve over the last year.”