THE MUSIC INDUSTRY IS TACKLING STREAMING FRAUD WITH A POINTLESS ‘CODE’. IT WON’T WORK… BUT THESE IDEAS MIGHT.
This quote didn’t come from a particular friend of music. It’s from Margaret Thatcher — the free-market-loving British prime minister (1979-1990) who happened to authorize some of the severest cuts in arts funding the UK has ever seen. Still, the point stands. And if you needed further evidence to back it up, the modern music industry has just provided it in abundance. On June 20th, a powerful group of industry organizations — including the three major labels plus publishing groups owned by Universal, Sony and Warner — inked a “Code of Best Practice” designed to tackle the blight of “fake streams” in the modern music business. Fake streams, in a nutshell, cover any instance — whether for monetary or industry/charting benefit — whereby one party pays another party to rack up illegitimate plays of an artist’s music. This is often achieved via bots or “stream farms,” where banks of devices all running services like Spotify continually play the music of the paying party...