Streaming fraud remains one of the biggest concerns facing the global music business, with the use of bots, click farms and coordinated artificial listening continuing to distort royalty payments, chart positions and consumption data across the industry.
Tuned Global, the technology platform used by businesses to power licensed music and audio services, has launched what it calls a Service Manipulation Detection (SMD) system, designed to help streaming platforms and rightsholders identify and act on that activity.
The offering, announced on Tuesday (April 21), monitors for manipulation tactics including bot usage, click farms, scripted listening and coordinated repeat plays โ all of which can distort play counts, chart positions and royalty allocations.
Rather than operating as a standalone specialist tool, the SMD system is embedded within Tuned Globalโs existing data processing environment, giving clients what the company describes as an โintegrated detection layerโ from within the platform itself. According to Tuned Global, the system addresses growing expectations from labels and publishers that streaming services maintain formal measures for detecting and preventing such activity.
The system monitors activity across five levels: track, artist, user, network and payment.
At the track level, the company said it identifies what it calls โabnormal consumption patternsโ including disproportionate play-to-listener ratios, unusual completion-rate and skip-rate distributions, playback bursts and repetitive listening behaviour. Artist-level analysis examines aggregate catalogue data for โsystemic patternsโ that may not be visible at the individual track level, Tuned Global said.
User-level monitoring flags excessive repetition, unusually high daily activity or what the company calls โinvariant listening patternsโ over time. Network-level controls detect suspicious login behaviour, geographic inconsistencies, and shared IP or device activity across…