Welcome back to The Club List, a newsletter about marketing, creativity, music, and making a business out of what you love. 

I got to see many of you out in the wild during Indie Week, and that was a joy! Last week, I learned a whole lot of new things and saw some fresh paths forward in my own work, while also hearing plenty about the obstacles in people’s lives as they try to market themselves in the modern world.

That’s led me to today’s newsletter, where we look under the hood of just how real some of the fraud in music streaming might actually be…and I try to do my part to get to the heart of the issue. And as always, I include One Thing You Can Use Today that’s a 30-second read for anyone creating online.

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Last week, we talked about how numbers are rarely ever real on the Internet. Today, we’re going to explore what can happen when the people you rent space from online decide you’re abusing their platform - whether you are, or not.

Read to the end to join the conversation. I’m launching a survey in an attempt to find just how widespread the problem I’m about to describe really is.

When Fraud Is Only Fiction

My last issue of The Club List emphasized some startling information about how real - or fake - many of the listeners on streaming services might be. The claim from Beatdapp: 40 distributors had about 50% of their traffic flagged as fraud in April. Half!

Now the next question: who is suffering from false positives? Few systems are perfect, after all, especially at the massive scale that streaming music has grown to. And if small artists get their work flagged, who speaks for them?

Last Friday, one of the most compelling artists in Ireland right now - Pier, a gifted rock anthem writer with Jeff Buckley-level chops on record and the live presence to back it up - announced that Spotify had flagged his song “Hollow” for fraud and was taking it down. Pier claims he’s never paid for bot streams or done anything improper, and what I’ve seen bears this out. The song is hovering just under 7,000 plays as I write this, which is great for a new artist doing it themselves in any country, but hardly the number a typical inflating campaign would be shooting for. I’m probably responsible for a solid 40 of them on my own. It was one of my favorite songs of last year.

The song was distributed through DistroKid and remains up on Spotify as of today. A single version of “Hollow” was taken down, but the album version is still there. Luckily, they were identical and were connected to each other when the album got uploaded; this means the song keeps its streams, but probably got removed from some playlists that had the single version saved. The single version is still live on other platforms, including YouTube - just not Spotify.

Confusing? Yes, it is.

And DistroKid doesn’t have much incentive to help. In a 2021 press release that announced its value at $1.3 billion, the company claimed to distribute more than 2 million artists and “30-40% of all new music in the world.” That was three years ago, so their artist roster has surely increased. How do you provide customer service to a robust degree for that many artists? Well, either it’s the main thing you focus on, or…you don’t. Spotify’s customer service will just tell you to contact the distributor. And so, this is how someone playing by the rules gets stuck in limbo.

To be clear, I have seen artists buy artificial streams before, and I’ve even spoken to some who had their work permanently penalized in Spotify’s algorithm for it. But that’s not what’s happening here.

Another example of bad things happening to honest people: Attack Magazine had created a special playlist of artists with under 1,000 streams on Spotify a couple months back, only to see several of them added to a botted playlist without their knowledge. This caused those artists to then get their songs flagged by Spotify, and Attack Mag had to use its platform to get the bot playlist removed. Without them in the mix, multiple artists would likely have had permanent damage to their streaming presence.

This is the 2020s equivalent of getting blacklisted from selling albums in record stores. It also looks a lot like Meta’s notorious post-2020 tendency to flag totally fine content that it thinks might break the rules on Facebook or Instagram - which we’ll touch on, in a moment.

This is not an isolated issue, it’s a real thing happening from multiple angles to random small acts. Is it innocent people getting caught by fraud schemes? Is it overactive detection software, like what a bank would use if you charged your credit card in a way that looked unusual?

The problem is widespread enough that I want to do what I can, as someone not at a distributor, streaming service, or label, to shed some light on the issue.

So! I’m launching a survey today for artists who have music on Spotify. If you’re an artist who has either been flagged by Spotify in the last 6 months or know that your song received suspicious streams during that time, I want to hear from you. And if you’re an artist with streaming music at all, your response is still valuable to this survey. You can be honest if you’ve ever paid for streams; all replies will be kept anonymous. It takes just 5-10 minutes to complete, and I welcome forwarding!

Music Streaming Survey for Artists - click that for more!

I’ll be analyzing this data at length and will present it here, two weeks from now. The survey closes on Friday, June 28.

One Thing You Can Use Today

I referenced Meta’s tendency to over-flag content above. Here is why I mentioned it!

In 2021, my band Lost Decades was about to release our debut album. On the eve of the record release, Instagram limited my ability to comment as our page, and it also made it so I couldn’t post captions with our images. None of the several other accounts I was running at the time were affected. My bandmates also had the same restrictions.

This was caused by their system flagging our Linktree as a suspicious link, because it was a shortened link. I read into this, and we weren’t the first band to have this happen. It could have blown up our album release entirely, but thankfully, that was not my first rodeo. It just meant we had to launch our own website faster than planned.

Having your own website is awesome. And it’s really, really easy to replace a shortened bio link (Linktree, Beacons, etc) for cheap. Here’s how to do it fast.

1.) Go to a site that sells domain names and buy one. I like Namecheap.com a lot, but you can use GoDaddy.com or whatever else intrigues you. Savvy Reddit searches will sometimes pull up discounts.

2.) If you use Canva Pro: Boot up Canva. Go to create a new design and search “Bio Link Website.” Suddenly, you’ll have a bunch of templates pop up. Fill one in with your branding and links, then publish the website and connect it to your new domain. Done!

3.) If you want to spend a little more time and get data on your traffic: You can do nearly the same thing in Wordpress, Squarespace, and other top site design platforms. This is a good beginner-friendly explainer for how to do this in Wordpress. You can choose to switch to this later, also.

Now you have an official website for your project, which can be expanded on later or linked to a larger portfolio. And you didn’t have to pay a premium to a link-in-bio company to hook their platform - and their data collection - to your domain name.

List of Clubs

These are the kinds of clubs I’d like to be in around NYC! Wherever you might find music, art, or a compelling experience under one roof, that’s a club to me. I only list clubs I’d enjoy going to. If I list a client, you’ll know.

Friday, June 21 - TENSION: Metawav, BAYS, David Lunch @ Hell Phone
Detroit and Brooklyn get together for a whole lot of techno in what’s technically the back of a coffee shop. 10pm until late, $10. I’m all over this.

Saturday, June 22 - BDA w/ Combo Chimbita @ H0L0 (free before 3pm w/ RSVP)
Toribio’s regular party is BDA. This is short for Bring Dat Ass. Saturday’s “all day summertime ASStravaganza” features Combo Chimbita in a rare live band feature on a BDA lineup.

Sunday, June 23 - 95 Bulls @ Our Wicked Lady ($13 cash at door, 7pm)
One of the few local bands on NYC’s rock scene that’s a guaranteed rager every single time they play, headlining Jonathan Toubin’s Sunday Soul Scream residency. At a Sunday Soul Scream, the bands set the ticket price together and get all door proceeds, with no presales (you can book a ticket on Dice but it’ll only serb a reminder). You could pick many worse ways to spend a Sunday.

Thanks for reading! And now, an image of me in the club…

The Club List is a newsletter from MeInTheClub.com. All issues are available at TheClubList.net. To inquire about marketing services for your work, contact [email protected] and include "Services” in the subject line.