Can You Buy Spotify Streams? Why Play Counts Are the Easiest Thing in Music to Fake

You can buy Spotify streams, in the sense that people will take your money for them. It breaks Spotify's terms, it can get your royalties withheld and your track pulled, and your distributor can pass a monthly fine on to you. The fact that it's for sale at all tells you what a play count is really worth.

What actually happens if you buy streams?

Spotify is unusually direct about this. Its own guidance for artists says paid services that guarantee streams "aren't legitimate" and that using them "could result in your music being removed from Spotify." When it confirms artificial streaming on a track, the list of consequences it gives is: royalties withheld, public streaming numbers corrected, the song pulled from Spotify playlists, and for repeated or egregious cases the content removed from the platform altogether.

Then there's the fine. Since April 2024 Spotify has charged labels and distributors per track when it detects flagrant artificial streaming. Distributors don't absorb that. TuneCore describes it as a monthly €10 penalty per track and takes it from the account holder's balance or card on file. CD Baby puts it at roughly $10 to $11 per track per month, showing up as a negative line on your statement.

So the maths on a bought campaign is odd. You pay a stranger for plays, the plays that get caught are wiped from your public number anyway, the royalties on them never arrive, and the track can end up costing you money every month it stays flagged. I get why artists do it. I just can't find the version of that trade where the artist wins.

How big is the fake stream business?

Big enough that the first criminal case has already been through a US court. On 19 March 2026 a North Carolina man, Michael Smith, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud after generating hundreds of thousands of AI songs and streaming them with thousands of bot accounts. Music Business Worldwide reported his bots peaked at around 661,440 streams a day across Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music. He agreed to forfeit $8,091,843.64.

That money didn't come out of Spotify's pocket, or Apple's. The US Attorney put it plainly: royalties diverted "from real, deserving artists and rights holders." Spotify says the same thing about its own system on its artificial streaming page, that undetected fake streams "dilute the royalty pool, shifting revenue from legitimate artists to bad actors." Read that twice if you get paid from a pool, because it's the platform describing its own plumbing.

Deezer is the only major service that publishes a fraud rate. For 2025 it put it at 8% of all streams on the platform, and says every fraudulent stream it detects is stripped out before royalties are paid. Nobody else tells you their number.

Why would anyone fake a play count in the first place?

Because everybody reads it. Labels look at monthly listeners before they reply to an email. Promoters check it before they put you on a bill. Playlist curators check it. Fans check it too, even the ones who'd never admit it, and a track sitting on 800 plays gets skipped by people who'd have loved it on 80,000. A public number becomes a sort of credit score, and once a number decides who gets a chance, somebody will sell you a better one.

I've been on the wrong end of this without ever buying a play. I had 1,089 monthly listeners on Spotify and it paid me about £13 a month. That figure sat on my profile for anyone to judge me by, and it didn't tell anybody a single true thing about the people behind it. Were they fans? Were they one playlist placement that dried up? Would any of them have come to a show in Birmingham on a Tuesday? The number couldn't say, and it still got read as a verdict on the music.

That's the part I keep coming back to. A play count mostly measures reach, and reach can be bought, borrowed off a playlist, or farmed by a bot. What it can't measure is whether anyone cared, which is the only thing an artist actually needs to know.

Why doesn't RAAYDR show public play counts?

We decided not to show them. No public play counts, no follower counts, no like counts on anyone's page. An artist sees their own numbers. Nobody else gets to see them, and nobody gets ranked by them in public. The short version of the reasoning is that we don't want RAAYDR to turn into a popularity contest, because the popularity contest is the thing the rest of streaming already runs, and it's where the fakes come from.

Take the scoreboard away and most of the reason to fake it goes with it. There's nothing to screenshot for a label, nothing for a curator to glance at, nothing to impress a stranger with.

The money side matters just as much, because it's the reason fraud doesn't pay here. RAAYDR doesn't pay from a shared pool. Each subscriber's money is split across the artists that subscriber actually played, so there is no pot for a bot to drain. A fake account has to pay for a full subscription before it can play anything, and the most it can ever do is move its own subscription's artist money around, which is always less than it paid in. We went through how that works against the AI upload flood last month.

None of that makes RAAYDR fraud proof, and I'd be lying if I said it did. People will try things. Plays are checked on our side rather than trusted from the app, there are daily limits on how much listening counts, and when payouts start they'll run a month behind, so money only moves once the payment behind it has cleared. The difference is that a cheat here has to spend real money to move less of it, which is a strange business to be in.

So what should an artist look at instead?

Your own numbers, privately, and preferably the ones that describe people. How many listeners came back after the first week. Who played the whole record and who bailed after track two. Whether the same forty people are doing most of your listening, which is a better sign than it sounds, because forty people playing you every day is how a fanbase starts, even if I know full well a big total on a playlist is still what gets you the meeting.

On RAAYDR those numbers are yours to see and nobody else's to judge. Whether that's enough to get artists to stop chasing the big public figure, I honestly don't know yet. We'll find out when the doors open.

Figures on artificial streaming fees, fraud rates and the Smith case come from the sources linked above, as published by September 2026. Fees are set by Spotify and passed on by distributors, and can change. RAAYDR hasn't launched to listeners yet, so descriptions of how RAAYDR pays describe the published model rather than observed payouts.