On June 17th, 2020 we published the OG Whac-A-Mole blog post after identifying a MASSIVE threat to the industry, and an opportunity to build a product to arm DSPs with the equivalent of enough mallets to beat the moles at their own game.
Since then, many great articles have been published on the topic. The late, great, Michael K Williams even produced an entire episode of his VICE original, Black Market, exploring the topic in 44 minutes of have-to-see-it-to-believe-it detail, clearly demonstrating the scale, scope and easily accessible nature of the fraud being perpetrated on our industry.
Seeing where the puck was going, our team at Beatdapp designed, developed, and deployed the product to fix the problem.
In 2020, estimates were 3-10% of all streaming activity was fraud. Today, we confidently say it’s at least 10%, and more in some regions. That equals ~$2B in potentially misallocated streaming revenues this year, and will be ~$7.5B by 2030 if left unchecked.
Emboldened by steady growing streaming revenues and an abundance of attack surface across the now hundreds of streaming services worldwide, fraudsters are deploying bots, stealing accounts, and manipulating platform features to steal income that otherwise belongs to musicians, labels, and the hundreds of thousands of industry professionals who help make all the songs we love to hear.
It isn’t all doom and gloom though. Two weeks ago in Nashville at the Music Business Associations annual conference #MusicBiz2022, streaming fraud was top of mind for labels, distributors, and DSPs alike.
The theme of the week was collaboration. Why? Because it is now clear that the industry’s path, which we identified in 2020, has reached its logical conclusion. We said then,
“Right now, as an industry, we’re playing hundreds of individual games of whack-a-mole to fight fraud. We’re developing unique internal systems and solutions to analyze patterns and detect inconsistencies, but as we’re learning, so are the moles. It’s hard to keep pace when you’re fighting alone.”
Going it alone isn’t going to cut it. It’s time we fight back together.
But working together isn’t always comfortable, especially when competition between streaming services is fierce, and the data required to effectively fight fraud is highly sensitive. That’s why Beatdapp has built the industry leading product suite to facilitate collaboration. Not only can we detect fraud with unparalleled accuracy, we also provide our partners with peace of mind by prioritizing data security, confidentiality, and integrity.
Our mission is to eliminate fraud, and ensure that our DSP clients are accurately paying all legitimate content licensors, and providing their users with the most integrous, relevant, and impactful content recommendations and charts. We are setting a new standard for the music industry and putting fraudsters on notice.
