Artificial streaming, not AI, is the threat to the music industry

LThe AST month, Reddit Detective, made an amazing discovery and maybe gave a look at the future of music: a band generation, the Velvet Sundown, landed in the users. With a full album with decent polished tracks, an invented biography and plausibly real pictures, “You” quickly collected 1 million monthly listeners on Spotify, apparently from the air.

When the industry raced to get to the bottom of the success of the Velvet Sundown, questions were raised and the debate followed. The industry and the Internet easily found similar bands and artists who had collected hundreds of thousands of listeners on all platforms and genres with non -real world expression.

In the discussion, things quickly became apparent questions about human creativity, IP protection, ethics and the role of AI in music. But the immediate problem that actually costs artists is not made like these songs. So they were heard.

The problem is not artificial intelligence. It's artificial Streaming.

Whether music is generated by machines or humans, they destroy into aututhentic streams of commitment and license fees. Bots, clickfarms and manipulated playlists are common tactics that are used in the entire digital ecosystem to create popularity. According to some estimates, 5 to 10 percent of all streams are fake. These are billions of listeners and real license fees that are transferred from legitimate creators to fraudsters who jump in the license pools. It is organized and demanding manipulation that leads to complaints and criminal investigations.

Do not understand me wrong: As the US authorities claim in the case of Michael Smith, the music of AI-generated music exacerbates the lightness of committing fraud by pulverizing all obstacles to the creation of music. But ask every artist and you will tell you that the mere creation of a song does not guarantee a listener, let alone hundreds of thousands of listeners. Streams do not happen in a market that flooded hundreds of thousands of new tracks every day.

If we want a really fair and transparent marketplace, we have to check whether an artist or a track benefits from non -authentic streams. We have to make sure that a song, regardless of its creation, brings to the audience through real commitment and not through play. Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether the music is made by a robot or a rock band. They only take care of using the system.

Fortunately, this is an area in which the industry can actively take responsibility and defend itself. Companies in the entire ecosystem invest heavily in fraud induction instruments and technologies. Streaming platforms punish fraudulent traces to prevent bad actors and work with artists, labels and distributors in order to raise awareness of suspicious activities. And thanks to the bundle of music against the music struggles, the industry leaders are working on anti-Fr-Fraud solutions with the aim of disturbing fraud as a unit front.

Through the cooperation and support of our defense, the music industry can have bad actors and deter their tactics. Together we can fight fraud and secure a fairer, more transparent and authentic streaming.

Michael Lewan is the managing director of Music fights against fraud alliance. The MFFA was introduced in 2023 and is a global non-profit organization that represents more than 25 member companies that are geared at the mission to eliminate streaming fraud. Before he came to the MFFA, he worked at the recording academy from 2017 to 2025, where he headed the initiatives for public order and advocacy.