A different kind of streaming fraud: Over 1m 'manipulated' tracks are on audio streaming services

On this episode of the Music Business Worldwide podcast –
supported by Voly Entertainment – MBW founder, Tim Ingham, is
joined by Rasty Turek.

Rasty is the founder and CEO of Pex – which, amongst other
things, tracks and analyses copyrighted content on digital
services.

According to Pex's tech, over a million tracks on audio streaming
services like Spotify, Apple Music, and TIDAL, are not what they
appear to be. 


These million-plus tracks are what Pex calls “modified audio” –
which means an original track has been sped up, slowed down, or
otherwise manipulated, and then uploaded as an entirely new
recording.

The main issue for the music industry? Unless these million-plus
tracks have legally licensed the original recording on which
they’re based, they’re infringing copyright. 

More than that, they’re pulling royalties away from the original
artists in question.

Pex has provided a number of examples of ‘sped up’ tracks on
audio streaming platforms that aren’t attributed to a recording's
original artist. 

There’s a version of Halsey’s 'Without Me', for example, with
over 6 million streams on Spotify. There’s also modified version
of Coldplay and The ChainSmokers’ ‘Something Just Like This’ that
has over 12 million plays. 

It’s not hard to find more: I took a cursory search through
Spotify before recording this and discovered a sped-up version of
Justin Bieber and Nicki Minaj’s Beauty and a Beat with over 8
million streams, and a sped-up version of Lady Gaga’s Bloody Mary
with over 25 million streams. In all of these cases, the credited
artist on each track – and therefore, presumably the artist
account collecting royalties – is not the original artist in
question.

As you can hear in our interview with Pex’s Rasty Turek, he
thinks this is an industry failing – and something of a sibling
to streaming fraud…