Music Platforms Unite To Form Anti-Fraud Alliance

Founding Members Include Digital Music Companies CD Baby and its parent company Downtown, TuneCore and its parent company Believe, DistroKid, UnitedMasters, Symphonic, EMPIRE, and Vydia as well as Digital Service Providers Spotify and Amazon Music

The National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance – a neutral third party will operationalize protocol for the centralized prevention of cross-platform streaming fraud, currently costing the industry hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

Music Fights Fraud will focus on streaming fraud and streaming manipulation across digital streaming services and will work to ensure that the global music streaming market is fair and that all members actively contribute to solutions intended to balance the equity of its operations.

The objectives of Music Fights Fraud are to detect, prevent, mitigate and enforce anti-fraud measures, thereby moving closer to an industry where fraud has no place.

Said Believe’s Founder & CEO Denis Ladegaillerie: “Believe is committed to fostering a fairer, balanced and diverse artist and label market, where all music creators can thrive.

As we build the future of our industry, we must ensure fake streaming and abusive streaming do not have a place.

The launch of Music Fights Fraud is an important step towards that goal, and I am proud to join hands with our digital music partners and distributors to ensure we find effective ways to stop fraud streaming, to ultimately bring more fairness and transparency to the music sector.”

Andreea Gleeson, CEO, Tune Core commented, “Streaming fraud is a costly issue, with bad actors diluting the royalty pool and taking money out of the pockets of legitimate music creators. This has a great impact on self-releasing artists, who account for 5.7% of the world’s recorded music and represent the fastest growing sector of the global music industry, with over 6.4 million artists.

Tune Core is proud to join other leading digital music distributors and DSPs to, for the first time ever, pool our resources and stand together to fight streaming fraud and create a fairer, more equitable streaming landscape for creators. ”Said CD Baby’s Chief Revenue Officer Christine Barnum, “

For 25 years, CD Baby has been committed to offering access for independent musicians and songwriters to grow their careers. As streaming has grown and dominated our industry the opportunities for bad actors to take advantage of the fragmentation has grown as well.

I am proud for CD Baby to be a founding member of Music Fights Fraud and for us to join forces to build a united and comprehensive solution to ensure all music creators are being compensated, with royalties generated making it to the right hands.”

The members of the Music Fights Fraud alliance will provide greater cross-platform collaboration and data sharing in coordination with a third party, the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance (NCFTA), a nonprofit partnership between private organizations, government, and academia.

The NCFTA’s mission is to provide a neutral, trusted environment enabling multi-party collaboration to identify, mitigate, and disrupt cyber crime. This will ultimately create a healthier music industry where genuine content creators are able to thrive.

The founding members of Music Fights Fraud are all strong advocates for artists’ rights. Each participating company has instituted internal measures to contend with fraud and, by creating this task force, is ultimately creating a healthier music industry where genuine content creators are able to thrive.

It has been estimated that industry-wide, streaming abuse could account for hundreds of millions of dollars lost each year.1 Streaming abuse, encompassing bots, streaming click farms, and imposters, impacts all artists – both self-released and those signed to labels.

It affects the music industry by diluting the royalty pool, reducing revenue for legitimate streams, and slowing the approval and release process for creators.