Back in the twentieth century, stealing music took actual physical labor. If you wanted to run a piracy ring or distribute bootlegged concert tapes, you needed a brick-and-mortar pressing plant, boxes of raw materials, and a distribution truck. For the anti-piracy teams running around trying to protect artist music, the target was clear: find the illegal factories and lock the doors. Even when CD burners and early file-sharing networks threw the industry into a loop around the turn of the millennium, piracy still required individual human users downloading individual files.
Streaming, however, completely rewrote the rules of engagement, giving birth to a completely invisible breed of financial scam. Instead of copying songs to sell them on the street, digital scammers began deploying bot farms, fake artist profiles, and manipulated playlists to automatically rack up millions of automated plays.
The goal wasn’t to share music; it was to trick the algorithms and siphon unearned cash out of the shared pool of money that streaming platforms used to pay legitimate creators. By 2019, according to data from the IFPI, global streaming revenue had climbed to $11.4 billion, accounting for a massive 56.1% of the entire global recorded music market. There was a giant pile of digital money sitting on the table, and internet scammers rushed in to grab a piece of it.
Catching the Copycats at the Front Door
We were at the forefront to address the fraud problem, which can be seen as a direct value extraction of money which should go in the pool of royalties for the artists. Our mission is centered on creating fair conditions for the artist and helping the DSPs to fight against fraud.
Romain Becker
Group Chief Operating Officer
While the rise of automated generative artificial intelligence would eventually expand this problem by allowing scammers to cheaply pump out millions of artificial tracks, the foundational battle lines were drawn in 2019. Believe was among the absolute first music companies to recognize that streaming manipulation was going to threaten the livelihood of real musicians, and they moved fast to protect their ecosystem.
At the time, Spotify was tracking around 40,000 brand-new song uploads every single day. To keep fraudulent files out of that massive daily wave, Believe partnered with the tech firm ACRCloud in July 2019, implementing an advanced audio-fingerprinting system. Think of it like an automated digital scanner: before a song could be distributed to streaming stores, the software checked its unique sonic print against existing databases to ensure a scammer wasn’t trying to re-upload someone else’s copyrighted work to steal their royalties.
“We were at the forefront to address the fraud problem, which can be seen as a direct value extraction of money which should go in the pool of royalties for the artists,” says Romain Becker. “Our mission is centered on creating fair conditions for the artist and helping the DSPs to fight against fraud.“
The ten-dollar streaming trap
To clean up the streaming landscape, Believe realised it couldn’t just build technical firewalls; it also had to educate independent labels and artists. Many independent creators didn’t understand the inner workings of digital platforms, making them easy targets for shady marketing companies making fraudulent promises.
We started an entire compliance process to be able to support the DSPs to identify fraudsters, educate our artists and our labels on what could be considered as fraud and how to avoid the fraud trap, Romain Becker explains.
The biggest risk was that ordinary, well-meaning independent labels were falling under the influence of digital scammers who cloaked fake bot plays as legitimate marketing campaigns.
“Some of our clients might receive a compelling email saying, ‘Hey, do you want to create fifty-thousand streams for your artist for ten bucks?’” says Romain Becker. “If I was a label, I might think, ‘Yeah, let’s try it!’ But this has a consequence. We trust our clients and we trust our artists to understand the implications of this. So rather than fighting the problem by just punishing or cutting contracts with them, we had an educational approach on what constitutes fraud, how to avoid falling into the trap of fraud, and how to avoid an appealing value proposition that will turn against you at the end of the day.“
Playing Cop on Repeat Offenders
We’ve built a fraud streaming policy which has gradual penalties that can go all the way up to contract termination with Believe. Have we terminated some contracts with some labels? Yes, we’ve done that
Romain Becker
Group Chief Operating Officer
While Believe preferred to teach independent artists how to spot these traps, they maintained a zero-tolerance policy for accounts that willfully chose to cheat the system. If a distributor lets fraudulent streams slide, it dilutes the payouts for every honest artist on the platform.
“If the education process didn’t work then it meant that we had a client who had decided to put fraud at the center of their business model, and they are people we can’t work with,” Romain Becker says bluntly. “For this, we’ve built a fraud streaming policy which has gradual penalties that can go all the way up to contract termination with Believe. Have we terminated some contracts with some labels? Yes, we’ve done that. We’ve done that because they were not respecting the rules, they had not understood the warning, and they were creating an issue in the ecosystem. We have to police this.“
Uniting the global industry
As streaming fraud expanded into an industry-wide headache, with some modern estimates suggesting that artificial plays impact nearly 10% of all global streams, Believe pushed for a united response. Protecting the integrity of the digital music economy required every major distributor and tech platform to start sharing their security data.
This shared mission laid the groundwork for the 2023 launch of the Music Fights Fraud Alliance (MFFA). Believe and its DIY arm TuneCore joined forces as founding members alongside digital giants like Spotify and Amazon Music to create a united, cross-industry frontline against streaming manipulation.
By the close of 2019, protecting the integrity of digital music had become an integral part of Believe’s operating model. Beyond enabling digital distribution and artist development, the company increasingly invested in the technologies, policies and industry partnerships needed to support a trusted and sustainable streaming ecosystem.
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Article written by Eamonn Forde. Eamonn Forde is an award-winning music business journalist and author. He writes for The Guardian, Forbes; Music Week, and Music Business Worldwide and several other publications.
