When Is A Music Stream Really A Stream?

Artists, managers. and labels, and sometimes ever fans, have an obsession with the charts. Being #1 isn’t enough anymore – you have to actually break some sort of record to be relevant, and that’s when things get out of hand. First we had schemes where CDs or downloads were bundled with merch, concert tickets or even newspapers (thank you, Prince), but that was the old music business. Today we have fake stream farms, pay-for-playlist placements, and streaming manipulation sites. It’s sometimes easy to tell whats fair and even legal in those cases, but what do you do about overzealous fans?

Stream Inflation

Take for instance “Dynamite” from K-Pop band BTS, a song that topped the Spotify charts on its launch date with 12.6 million streams, the biggest first day for a track on the service in 2020. Not only that, the video for the song reached more than 101 million views in its first 24 hours on YouTube, a record for that platform. Good for BTS – they’re massively popular.

Yet when you checked out the Spotify charts for the day the song was only credited with a little less than 7.8 million streams instead of the 12.6 million “unfiltered” plays as the group claimed. So what’s going on?

BTS fans may be the most rabid that any artist or group has ever had, and they’re coordinated too. They rallied the troops with the explicit idea in mind to not only have “Dynamite” reach #1 on multiple streaming services, but at record levels as well. That mean that some users listened or viewed the song over and over throughout the first day, accounting for its huge numbers. Couldn’t this be considered cheating?

Maybe so, but it’s one thing for management or a label to manipulate the numbers for gain or glory, but it’s another when it’s all organized through a loose de facto fan club online.

There’s A Fix For That

It turns out that Spotify has a system in place to spot “play inflation.” The service reportedly caps the number of plays that a user can contribute to a song’s chart position in any 24 hour period. This algorithm is no secret to end users either. You’ll see on SpotifyCharts.com where it states that the charts “are generated using a formula that protects against any artificial inflation of chart positions.”

Granted, having your fans stream your song over and over is much preferable to using a bot farm to artificially listen to your music just to increase your royalties. One might even argue that the idea is not that different from fans buying multiple records from brick and mortar record stores in the 60s, or calling their local station requesting their favorite song over and over during radio’s heyday. Today’s its done on a global scale.

That said, some services (like Spotify) seem to guard against this happening while most others are either oblivious to it or don’t much care to begin with. The way I look at it is a real hit can only be seen when taking the long view. If a song remains popular over a significant period of time (months as opposed to weeks), then it has some legit popularity. If it comes and goes quickly despite the high stream numbers, you might begin to question the totals.

But They Have An Army

BTS may be a special case though. The BTS Army is fiercely loyal and more activated than nearly any other artist’s fan base. According to Brandwatch, the Army may be as large as 48 million, has its own series of Twitter hashtags, and mentions the group more than 1 million times every day! And just because the group is from Korea doesn’t mean that most of their fans is mainly Asian. The Army is actually strongest in the U.S., with 17% of its social traffic coming from there.

Still, the controversy of what amounts to an official stream remains a complicated one. Every time we think we’ve gotten a handle on it there’s a new twist that pops up. No doubt the BTS Army will continue to keep us on our toes.