Music actors unite against fake streams

Music Fights Fraud has just been launched as a global task force aimed at detecting, preventing and enforcing anti-fraud measures against fake streams. This action follows a study conducted in France where the Centre National de la Musique revealed that approximately 3% of streams are fraudulent. Music Business Worldwide calculated that this represents “an overall loss of revenue of more than 500 million dollars if extended to the global music market”. It is important to note, as mentioned by MBW in another article, that this percentage specifically pertains to the fraudulent streams that the services are actually able to identify, and does not encompass those that go undetected.

Together with the help of the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance (NCFTA), this alliance, composed of Spotify, Amazon Music, and a few digital distributors, is committed to providing greater cross-platform collaboration and data sharing in order to identify, mitigate, and disrupt cyber crime.

Pascal Bittard, President at IDOL, commented in Music Week: “I’m delighted to see DSPs and distributors of different stripes unifying to deal with the growing problem of streaming fraud. It will be interesting to see what the next steps for the alliance are, and IDOL will be keen to get involved if there is concrete action.

“DSPs must continue improving their resources and technological efforts if they are to better detect all forms of fraudulent activities. Larger rightsholders, meanwhile, need to step up and be clearer about measures they intend to take against artists, labels, producers and managers behind such fraud.”

Last March, Music Business Worldwide shared an opinion piece on the phenomenon of fake streams, written by Pascal Bittard. In this piece, IDOL’s president gives his point of view as a distributor, and his recommendations to address this issue.

Read the complete op-ed on Music Business Worldwide

Read Pascal Bittard’s opinion column about the user centric’s payment system.