Paying for streams can result in a sudden surge in streams and traffic, and one might wonder, what harm does this actually cause? Well, as an increase in streams automatically leads to additional royalty revenue, manipulating them equals monetary fraud. It’s also against the Terms & Conditions of streaming services and digital distributors, which may lead to a series of negative effects.
Most streaming services - and Amuse - have over the years implemented sophisticated systems to discover and monitor artificial streaming activity. Engaging in artificial streaming activity can lead to:
Streaming services not paying out royalties generated by artificial streams
Monetary fines for affected releases
Takedowns of affected releases and catalogs
Frozen or deactivated Amuse accounts
If Amuse has fined your account as a result of artificial streaming, this is because Spotify has detected and verified streams as artificial. They have also withheld royalties for those streams, and applied fine(s) to Amuse for the relevant tracks. As a result, Amuse has applied a $10 per track found in Spotify's report that has been deducted from your Amuse wallet. You’ll have been emailed more information.
Amuse will never fine or punish artists whose releases do not show signs of artificial streaming. If you have experienced one of the consequences above, it is because we have verified artificial streaming on your account, either by our internal processes, or by official reporting from the DSPs.
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