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…