I recently wrote a post celebrating a sudden burst of 1,000+ plays on the song Next:

Next has reached the “1,000 plays” milestone some time over the last week or two, I suspect. It is the second of my songs to hit this threshold on Spotify.

I was pleased that this song was gaining some traffic, and wondered what happened.

My “Spotify for Artists” dashboard shows a spike in about 623 plays on Friday, January 24, 2025. After that, it returned exactly to the previous amount. It was an anomaly.

I figured it was perhaps someone on a Twitch stream playing it and doing something akin to a Spotify Jam with many listeners. Perhaps most people might not like it, but it would explain a sudden burst with a decline back to normal stream counts.

Artificial streams

Turns out, the traffic was probably fake. I received an email from my music distributing service provider today:

ALERT: Your music has been removed from Spotify due to artificial streaming activity

Spotify has detected that the majority of streams on some of your track(s) were artificial.

As a result, the release(s) containing those track(s) have been removed from Spotify.

Your music has not been removed from any other streaming service and is still live everywhere else where you’ve chosen to distribute it.

It’s a bummer to have this happen. I don’t care about getting rich off of my music, because my music isn’t really meant for the masses. I just upload it so that others might stumble upon something they enjoy every now and then.

I’d simply prefer to have the fraudulent activity erased from my stream history and simply not be paid for streams that aren’t real. Instead, I might have to re-upload tracks. All because of some random person or bot that decided to stream one of my songs.

Is it worth it?

If this happens again, I might consider taking down my music. I pay a small fee every year to upload music to these platforms, and I have no interest in dealing with this.