Apple Music is cracking down on streaming fraud. Good. But more can be done.
Streaming fraud–where bots listen to bots and siphon royalties away from legitimate human artists, among other things–is a massive problem. Streaming platforms are looking for ways to combat the situation.
Apple Music is a target of these thieves, just like all the others. And like every other company, they’re fighting back.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Apple exec Oliver Schusser said this:
“Streaming manipulation on our platform is already incredibly low. We literally have systems where we check and validate every single play on Apple Music.
“When we find fraud we remove the stream counts, we remove from the charts, and we take the money and put it back into the pool so that it goes to honourable artists… we have removed billions of manipulated streams from the service in 2025 alone.”
Apple is also levying big fines on distributors which facilitate streaming fraud. “Increasing the penalties takes the money from people who are cheating and puts it back into the system for those who aren’t,” says Schusser.
The good news is that, according to Apple, less than 1% of all streams are manipulated in some way. Maybe ban AI-generated music entirely? C’mon Apple. We know you have the technology.
