Enzo Mazza, president of the Italian recording industry federation FIMI, is calling on streaming platforms, distributors, chart compilers and the courts to act together against organised streaming fraud that pairs AI-made tracks with bot listeners. In an interview with Il Sole 24 Ore published on 27 September, he said platforms cannot ignore a problem that hurts the whole sector and their own credibility.
In the scheme he describes, fraudsters upload tracks, some of them made with AI, then use fake accounts and bots to play them. He sums it up as robots listening to robots. Each fake stream earns very little, but across thousands of tracks and profiles it adds up. Because streaming revenue is pooled and split by play count, the money comes out of genuine artists' share. Mazza compares it to a bank clerk skimming a few euros from each of thousands of accounts instead of robbing one big client: the pie stays the same, but more people take slices. The worst cases so far have been in Latin America, especially Brazil, and in the US.
Mazza said FIMI first spotted the problem in the charts, when unknown songs by unknown artists entered the top 100 with no sign of success anywhere else. Small labels and lesser-known artists lose the most, because they are the ones pushed out of charts and royalties. He warned that time is short, since AI and bots together can cause lasting damage that late fixes cannot undo. The problem, as the paper frames it, is about trust as well as money: if streams can be bought or faked, charts and royalties become unreliable.
He thinks Italy is well placed legally, because its cyber-fraud laws allow criminal cases against what he sees as plain commercial fraud. FIMI already monitors with NIQ, formerly GfK, which compiles the official charts, and suspicious tracks have been removed several times. A workshop on streaming fraud is due at Milan Digital Week on 30 September.
Sources · 1