Streaming Farms: The Dark Underbelly of Music Streaming

By Ellie Crosbie

Despite what you may have heard, there’s big money to be made in music streaming. According to a report conducted by Music Business Worldwide, the three major music groups (Sony, Universal and Warner) collectively generated a staggering $6.21 billion from streaming revenues in the first three months of 2023, equating to $69 million a day per label. And one thing is for sure – where there’s big money to be made, criminality never looms too far behind.

One of the key appeals of digital streaming upon its advent was its potential to democratise music, granting anyone, anywhere the ability to create and share music worldwide. Services such as Spotify, Tidal, and Soundcloud have been instrumental in transforming how we consume and produce music this century. However, as time has progressed, this once promising system has been exploited and abused, and recent years have seen the rise of so-called ‘streaming farms’ set up by criminal gangs seeking to make big profits through the manipulation of music algorithms.

It is an incredibly simple process: gangs create profiles as ‘distributors’, upload fake music (often white noise) to streaming platforms and then set up tech stacks, where songs are played on a continual loop by hundreds of devices to artificially inflate streams. The pay-outs can prove lucrative, with industry mainstays like Rolling Stone speculating that legitimate artists are losing around $300 million each year due to the high number of fraudulent music distributors that have popped up over recent years. This is because under current streaming arrangements, money is distributed from service providers based on the recording’s share of listeners rather than at a flat rate. Additionally, analysts at JP Morgan recently found that if someone were to upload their own 30 second track to a streaming platform and programmed a device to listen to it on repeat for 24 hours, it would receive $1200 per month in royalties.

Not only do streaming farms earn substantial sums for criminal collectives, but the organisations themselves can be contracted to increase an artist’s visibility and gain commercial traction on their songs, since many charting companies now count Spotify streams as ‘purchases.’ Big artists such as G-Eazy and French Montana are just two who have previously been caught up in fake streaming scandals, and allegedly, music labels have been known to use streaming farms to boost their own artists’ streams and keep them hot on the market.

But it doesn’t end there. Criminals are even using streaming farms (which are in themselves an illegal method of generating profit) to launder money. By purchasing bitcoin on the dark web with the money they need cleaning, they then pay individuals with this cryptocurrency to set up streaming farms and keep playing their fake music, before subsequently receiving clean money from the digital streaming service as revenue. What makes this activity so difficult to intercept is the fact that cryptocurrency is largely untraceable, making it very difficult for authorities to attribute it to perpetrators. This has devastating real-world repercussions; a recent Swedish newspaper article revealed that gangs responsible for shootings and bombings across the country were using Spotify to launder money from drug deals, robberies, fraud, and contract killings. The newspaper said its information had been verified by four criminals from separate gang networks in Stockholm, as well as an anonymous police investigator.

The situation is a graphic illustration of just one of the ways in which a well-intentioned online streaming system has had adverse implications on the health of the global music industry. Spotify and Apple Music claim to have put in place protections against their own services being abused in this manner, but it's difficult to conceive how these measures can keep up with the ever-increasing number of fake ‘distributors’ that continue to multiply by the day. By manipulating metrics, streaming farms have paved the way for a musical landscape that values success quantitatively rather than qualitatively, and rendered it impossible to gauge genuine interest in the artists and trends of today’s industry.  Furthermore, they will no doubt have diverted attention away from the true artistic merit of hundreds of talented artists who are already paid paltry sums by digital streaming services, and struggling to compete in an environment where market visibility has been monopolised by fraudsters.

With the effects of streaming farms not only undermining the calibre of musicianship at the forefront of the industry but also facilitating violent and organised crime, it is evident that cooperation from a variety of parties is needed to address the problem. First and foremost, digital platforms must strengthen measures to detect and combat streaming farm activity. But record labels and artists also play a crucial role in advocating for fair practices within the industry to deter and penalise those engaging in fraudulent practices. They are responsible for fostering an environment of transparency and accountability and must be willing to put authentic audience engagement above personal gain.

Finally, as music fans, it might be easy to assume that the problem falls outside our purview. However, every little bit helps, and choosing to engage with artists based on the merit of their work rather than succumbing to manipulated popularity metrics can make a small, albeit significant, difference. With the issue showing no signs of abating anytime soon, consumer awareness of the dangers that streaming farms pose is key in preserving a musical environment where talent thrives, and genuine artistic expression is duly celebrated.