January 27, 2021
By Alon Dayan CEO, Unbotify
Blog

Bulk Streaming and Fake Listens: How Bots Are Impacting the Music Streaming Industry

Every morning millions of people wake up with a cup of coffee and some of their favorite music—and there's a very good chance that the track is on a music streaming service. The U.S. 尼尔森音乐/MRC年中报告 found that audio streaming platforms served 79% of music listened to by American consumers in the first half of 2020 (video streaming came in second). 但在这个正常的场景背后, there are bad actors attempting to prey on streaming services and record labels—and stealing revenue from your favorite artists. 虚假流媒体可能会让艺人付出代价每年3亿美元. 很多时候，他们是用机器人来做这件事的.

流媒体的经济学

The first thing to understand is how the streaming economy operates. When you pay your subscription every month or listen to an ad between tracks on your free account, 这些钱被添加到一个池中.

流媒体平台抽成，这在池子里占一定比例，但最大的份额是有回报的厂牌、分销商、出版商和收藏协会. These groups then pay musicians based on the terms of their individual contracts.

How this label and distributor money is allocated is pro rata; so if we imagine that Enya gets 2% of the total streams on a streaming platform that month, Enya's record company 获得总收入的2% 分配给当月的权利持有人, to then be distributed to Enya based on the terms of her contract with the record label.

金银岛唱片

There are two main areas of attack that bot fraudsters use to redirect revenue from creatives to their own pockets. 第一种是循环播放非艺术家拥有的“假”曲目. This video of a set-up with thousands of devices playing songs on loop gives an idea of the scale.

Bots allow non-artists to skim millions of dollars away from legitimate artists by creating thousands of fake accounts and having them play tracks registered to the fraudster. 但是你如何产生收益呢?

音乐商业全球(MBW)解释道他们是如何把这些虚假的听众变成实实在在的现金的. 假设你以9美元的价格创建了1000个账户.99-per-month. 这意味着每月大约要花费1万美元. 但是在收入方面? To calculate the monthly revenue you need to consider that on many streaming services, 歌曲长度必须达到30秒才能盈利. 一天有86400秒.

用机器人提供超人的能力来听音乐, 这使机器人装备能够收听2,每台设备每天880首歌.整个农场的1000台设备价值900万美元. When you consider a whole month, that's some 86,400,000 plays total. 即使你说的是每次游戏不到一美分, you're still in the ballpark of a quarter of a million dollars per month. 这一切都是为了1000个订阅费，外加管理费用. And it's not difficult to get one of these operations off the ground. This Vice article gives a run through of just how simple it is to establish a "musical click fraud" operation.

The Hype Machine

The second way bot vendors can game the system is by undermining one of the core tenets of music promotion: it takes attention to get attention. With actual living people time-pressed and judicious with their attention, 他们经常随大流，看看什么是流行的.

Unscrupulous bot vendors offer artists the ability to circumvent the natural order of things, 并批量购买流. 只要一笔简单的预付款, the fraudsters offer the ability to provide a huge botfarm of devices to listen to your track thousands of times, meaning 更好的搜索位置; the 有可能出现在热门播放列表中, 最重要的是，注意力. 虽然这对艺术家来说并不是直接的经济打击, it does shift the goalposts so that attention isn't earned by those who deserve it, 而是那些有能力支付机器人供应商费用的人.

在竞争激烈的职业音乐世界里, 这可能是一场连球迷都参与其中的战斗, understanding that streams and rankings are the currency of popularity. K-pop fans are infamous for their "stop at nothing" philosophy towards boosting their favorites, 包括部署机器人农场，以确保他们在排行榜上名列前茅. 韩语里甚至有一个词来形容它， sajaegi.

如何打败机器人

对于唱片公司和流媒体服务, validating the integrity of streams is essential to ensuring equitable allocation of streaming revenues to artists and rights holders. However, 就像游戏和电子商务等垂直行业一样, 机器人欺诈的威胁一直存在，并将继续存在.

随着防护变得越来越复杂，攻击也变得越来越复杂. The key to staying ahead in this cat-and-mouse game is to stay prepared at an organizational level: employ people to this exact purpose. Make use of a dedicated team to stay on top of the latest innovations in both bot fraud and preventative measures.

This way, 你的应用更新可以走在游戏的前面, and the latest app prevention software can be brought in at an early stage. Letting consumers know you've taken the threat of bot fraud seriously and have taken this positive action can only serve to improve levels of trust in your app.

However, 尽管有损坏, the digital bread-crumb trail that bots leave can't be detected without a lot of work. 这是一项由公司内部单独承担的艰巨任务. For this reason, it's important to ensure you compliment your in-house team with industry-leading tools to detect and eliminate bots. By using machine learning and leveraging the complexity of anonymized sensor data from human-device interaction, bot detection solutions can discern the patterns in behavior that can distinguish between humans and bots. From there, it's easy to weed out the bots and take back control of the streaming economy.

[编者注:这是来自 Unbotify. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]