AI Slop Meets the Music Royalty Pool, and Congress Is Noticing

The U.S.Copyright Office has opened a public inquiry into music streaming fraud, asking artists, record labels, streaming platforms and anyone else with data to weigh in on how bot farms and AI-generated tracks are siphoning money from the royalty pool.

Published in the Federal Register on October 7, the notice follows a May 21 letter from Rep.Scott Fitzgerald of the House Judiciary Committee.

He asked the Office to examine how widespread streaming fraud is across digital platforms and what it’s doing to the industry.The Office says the responses, along with its own research, will help inform Congress.

Why the pie keeps getting smaller for honest artists The problem comes down to how streaming pays out.Most services put a share of their revenue into a pool and divide it by play count, so more streams means a bigger cut.

That setup gives bad actors a clear incentive to fake plays.The notice lists the usual tactics: bot farms, click farms staffed by human workers, playlist stuffing, hijacked accounts and “ghost tracking,” where someone uploads a slightly altered copy of another artist’s song and claims it as their own.

Many of these schemes, the Office notes, are run through unethical marketing companies.The stakes are huge.

The notice cites roughly $9.5 billion in U.S.streaming revenue for sound recordings and $22 billion globally.

Music publishers, meanwhile, brought in an estimated $7.3 billion domestically and $10 billion worldwide.Beyond the royalty dilution, the Office points to secondary damage.

Fake streams can skew playlist placement and recommendation algorithms, and they muddy the data artists and venues use to decide when and where to tour.Scroll to continue more from edm SoundCloud Now Lets Artists Sell Music Straight From Their Profiles AI? No way The inquiry leans heavily on the AI angle.

The notice points to the case of Michael Smith, a North Carolina man who uploaded hundreds of thous...