Spotify is the world's leading music streaming service, and represents all of the best and worst things about the music industry today to a tee. One thing they seem committed to fixing, though, is the prevalence of fake streams and stream-botting on the platform. According to chart data, the company removed "notable streaming volume" from songs across all genres for the third month in a row, a consistent practice they began this February. Now that we're in April, fans have more and more questions about who this is really about. Of course, hip-hop fans have an obvious example: the expansive and zombie-fied Kendrick Lamar and Drake beef.
The last update we got on that was Drake's legal team's supposed plan to retract their "Not Like Us" botting claims in their legal pursuit of UMG. This is by no means proof of no wrongdoing, and we don't even know if the 6ix God's lawyer was sincere in saying this. Attorney Michael Gottlieb said his team plans to retract those Spotify allegations while demanding the court uphold the discovery process in this case, which they did.
How Much Does Spotify Pay Artists?
As such, a lot of people immediately tied this general, vague, and all-genre-encompassing Spotify move to this Kendrick Lamar and Drake situation, even though nothing concretely ties this together. Similar botting allegations in hip-hop recently attacked artists like Doechii, but they extend far beyond the scope of the culture into every other musical style and community. A spokesperson for Spotify put out a statement pertaining to the stream botting issues. “Spotify’s efforts to detect and prevent artificial streaming are long-standing, platform-wide, and genre-agnostic. Spotify invests heavily in automated and manual reviews to prevent, detect, and mitigate the impact of artificial streaming on our platform. When we identify stream manipulation, we take action that includes removing streaming numbers and withholding royalties. Bad actors are always evolving, so our dedicated fraud prevention team is always working to identify new trends and methods used to game the system.”
There have also been allegations from fans and artists that Spotify is somehow giving artists a bad deal. A spokesperson for the company believes this is not the case. “The idea that Spotify “abuses” artists is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how streaming economics work. No streaming service pays on a per-stream basis. A high per-stream payout actually indicates fewer listeners on the service. To break it down: the per-stream rate equals total payouts divided by total streams. Fewer streams result in a higher per-stream rate – but ultimately lower overall payments for artists.”
