What is stream farming?

Explanation: streaming farms, the black market for the music business

Afrobeats music artists BNXN (aka Buju) and Ruger exchanged words on Twitter about who the biggest star was. In one of his posts, BNXN accused Ruger of using live broadcast farms to illegally increase broadcast numbers, resulting in more royalties and other benefits.

“There are streaming farms in Nigeria now. A room where label heads pay money to get your songs by automation, no real fans, no real people, just a front. You're going to make the people who really work for this bleed and your day is coming,” BNXN said.

He went on to question how the artist got millions of views on other platforms but got less than 5,000 on Spotify, which has a strict policy against synthetic streams.

For some people, this recent post of tweet may be the first time they learn what streaming farms are. But it is not a new phenomenon in the world of music. Industry mainstays such as Rolling Stone speculate that artists could lose about $300 million each year due to the large number of fake global streams.

streaming farms as the black market for the music business; They are services designed to increase the number of illegal listens to a song through bots or the use of a large number of phones.

They're creating listening bots that can stream songs up to 1,000 times per minute, which means that in just 10 minutes they might give a musician or band over 10,000 imaginary streams of their song. This greatly increases the number of airplays for the song.

Unfortunately, many brands use it to boost artist streams and keep them hot in the market, while unknown artists use it to get the attention of big labels. On a global scale, some big names in the music industry have been accused of using streaming farms to boost or inflate numbers.

French Montana was accused in January 2020 of faking Spotify streams, an allegation he denied. G-Eazy's management was caught in 2021 red-handed through leaked phone calls.

Nigerian music journalist Joy Akan recently tweeted: “Apple Music Top 100 has become a marketing tool for the Nigerian musician, not an independent regulation of the country’s listening habits. Bragging rights and screenshots aside, people are flocking to climb up there to bring the record to public attention.”

Los Angeles-based audio engineer Brian Harrington has written about music broadcast farms and how to identify them, saying that small towns listed as "best city" are a big red flag. According to Harrington, the ratio of followers to listeners on Spotify and engagement with fans on social media indicates whether an artist's following is legitimate or artificially inflated.

In 2021, platforms like Spotify count repeat streams as long as that song is listened to for more than 30 seconds before it plays again regardless of what song was played before.

However, artificially increasing the number of plays of a song is against Spotify's rules and may result in the broadcast of that song being deleted or removed altogether. Basically, it's okay to listen to a song on repeat over and over again, but repeating the song for hours or even a day that seems inorganic might push the boundaries of what's acceptable for Spotify.

Repetition may be one of Spotify's algorithmic playlists that encourage repeated listening but keep track of these types of behaviour. Spotify looks at thousands of data points and compares them to other users' listening behavior and can take action if they think they need to.

Aside from removing songs from the platform, there are other penalties that can be imposed on the streaming platform to remove the distributor, as the artist used to distribute music from the distributor platform which denies them the ability to upload music to Spotify again.

By monitoring a user's unique listening behavior compared to the user's usual listening activity, Spotify may identify fake streams. When there are no more streams than listeners, for example, Spotify can consider the playlist to be false.

Remember, Spotify has a lot of information about the music it provides and the ways its users interact with it. With this information, they can identify situations in which something looks fake.

Speaking about why labels use streaming farms, Akan said: “That marketing company that offers you a bunch of streaming numbers for the money or guarantees you a number one spot. What do you think they do? Go house to house and ask people to tap politely on your music? Or Smash the bank on ineffective ads? Everyone goes to farmland.”

Regarding ethical practices, Twitter user KontentSensei, who writes about the music business on Twitter, said: "For breakout artists and independent artists, it means that an already competitive industry is now more competitive. You have to compete with more talented people."

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