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Business News Digital Labels & Publishers
Tracks from AI music platform Boomy removed from Spotify because of stream manipulation, not any anti-AI agenda
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 5 May 2023
Tracks created via AI music platform Boomy were removed from Spotify recently because of evidence of stream manipulation rather than as a result of any push by the streaming service to take down AI-created music in general, it has been confirmed.
Boomy – which allows people to “create original songs in seconds” and then distribute them to the streaming services – first told users via its Discord server that: “Very recently, Spotify stopped publishing new releases from Boomy. Additionally, certain catalogue releases were removed from their platform”.
That followed Universal Music’s recent call for the streaming services to remove any AI-created tracks that are the result of unlicensed data-mining, ie the maker or user of the generative AI tool employed to create a track trains that tool by mining data linked to existing songs and recordings without getting permission from whoever controls the existing music
That call came as a flurry of AI-created tracks in the style of existing artists went viral. In particular, the Ghostwriter track ‘Heart On My Sleeve’, which featured AI-created vocals in the style of Drake and The Weeknd.
Some wondered whether the Boomy statement was linked to Universal Music’s call for a clampdown. However, this does not seem to be the case. Spotify has confirmed that the blocking and removal of some Boomy-created tracks is due to evidence of stream manipulation.
Stream manipulation, of course, is where people employ various dodgy tactics to boost the number of streams their tracks receive on the streaming platforms.
Sometimes that’s actual artists wanting to boost their stats so that they appear more popular than they really are. But sometimes it’s an attempt to scam the system for profit. Because of the way the streaming business model works, you can buy a load of subscriptions, set them up to automatically listen to your own music on repeat, and get more out of the system in royalties than you put in by buying the subscriptions in the first place.
Confirming that “patterns of artificial streaming” had motivated the removal of some Boomy-created tracks, a Spotify spokesperson told Music Ally: “When we identify or are alerted to potential cases of stream manipulation, we mitigate their impact by taking action that may include the removal of streaming numbers and the withholding of royalties. This allows us to protect royalty payouts for honest, hardworking artists”.
Boomy itself is not accused of being involved in stream manipulation, rather it’s thought that some of the people who created music on its platform then sought to artificially boost the streams of that music by setting up or buying in some stream manipulation tools and tactics.
Stream manipulation – and especially the specific scams designed to pull cash out of the system – have been a talking point for years in the music industry, of course, with regular calls for the services and the distributors to spot and block the scammers. Some reckon that the scale of stream manipulation is higher than many people realise, and with tools like Boomy making it easier to create original music, the number of entities gaming the system in this way is likely to increase.
Obviously, most services and distributors have been working to prevent stream manipulation for sometime at one level or another, as Spotify’s statement to Music Ally confirmed.
Though, it’s becoming increasingly clear that there needs to be a more collaborative effort between all the services and distributors, otherwise as soon as a scammer is spotted distributing music via one distributor, they’ll move their content under new names to another. That need has resulted in more recent efforts to ramp up communications between the distributors on this point.
Many of the scams that seek to profit by gaming the system – rather than just making certain artists look more popular – would actually be killed off if the digital music industry shifted to a so called user-centric model for royalty distribution. Assuming music uploaded by the scammers is only really streamed by the scammer’s own computers, under user-centric they could only pull out of the system what they put in, minus VAT and the streaming service’s cut.
That said, while record labels are putting ever more pressure on the services and distributors to crack down on stream manipulation, most of them remain somewhat lukewarm to the idea of an industry-wide shift over to a user-centric system.
