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Artificial streaming and paid 3rd-party services that guarantee streams

Paid 3rd-party services that guarantee streams aren’t legitimate.

3rd-party promotional services that advertise streams in return for payment violate our terms & conditions, and using them could result in your music being removed from Spotify. Any service that claims to offer guaranteed placement on playlists on Spotify in exchange for money are in violation of our terms & conditions, and they shouldn't be used.

Read our blog for a guide to gaining an authentic following through Spotify’s tools and resources.

The consequences for participating in these services

When we identify or are alerted to potential or confirmed cases of stream manipulation, we take action that may include the withholding of royalties, the correction of streaming numbers, and measures to ensure the artist or song’s popularity is accurately reflected in our charts. Spotify reserves the right to remove manipulated content from the platform.

If this happened to you but you believe your streams were earned authentically, you should share information with your distributor or label about the methods used to genuinely promote the content in question. They'll work with our team to review, and hopefully get the problem solved quickly.

How Spotify protects against artificial streaming

An artificial stream is a stream that doesn't reflect genuine user listening intent, including any instance of attempting to manipulate Spotify by using automated processes (bots or scripts).

We put significant engineering resources and research into detecting, mitigating, and removing artificial streaming activity on Spotify so that nothing stands in the way of our mission of giving artists the opportunity to live off their art, and so that rights holders are paid as fairly as possible for their work. The integrity of this is incredibly important to us because an illegitimate stream means there are honest, hard-working artists on the other side that are impacted.

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