Greetings from Nashville and the Music Biz conference, y’all, where the buzzword of the week is, of course, AI. Today we’ll get into some of what I’m hearing on the ground. Plus, an exclusive, early look at new streaming fraud research. As always, if you have something to share, reach me through email, and if you haven’t yet subscribed to this newsletter, please do so here.
We’re over a decade into the music streaming economy, and platforms are still contending with a major issue: fraud. I published a story last week about the problem and cited a stat from Beatdapp , a company that works with digital service providers (DSPs) and music labels to detect and mitigate abnormal activity. Last year, the company estimated at least 10% of streaming activity is fraudulent, adding up to around $2 billion in revenue being misallocated per year. That could be higher for mid-sized DSPs, they say, even going as high as up to 30% of activity. (For what it’s worth, a report from a government organization in France put that stat closer to between 1% and 3% for streams in the country in 2021.)
