 Hey, everybody. What's going on? It's your man, Kobe. Welcome to the digital dash. And as you can see today, I don't have my backdrop. I don't have none of that stuff. Pretty much because the topic that I want to touch on today came out after I had time to shoot my videos, but it was something that I wanted to dive into before it became old news because it's going to affect a lot of you guys, especially those of you who are including playlist like Spotify playlist into your marketing campaign and your song promotions. So what exactly am I talking about? Now, as of a couple of days ago of making this video, Spotify, Deezer and a couple of major labels have announced that they've teamed up to create what they call the anti-stream manipulation code of best practice. And pretty much what this code seeks to do is to stop streaming fraud on Spotify, on Deezer and on streaming platforms as a whole. Now I touched on this in an older video, but Spotify has been having problems with streaming fraud since damn near the beginning of Spotify. There's a very famous story about a guy who created thousands of Spotify account, created fake songs, put them in playlists and then use these to finesse Spotify of about a million dollars or something bigger than that. And if you're someone that's used playlists, you've been actively pitching yourself to playlists. Then you understand that there's a big problem within the industry of bot playlists and go streams. Now bot playlists are pretty much playlists that are to have streams that are generated by computer programs and bots, much like the ones you see on Instagram or Twitter, just made for that platform. And ghost streams are pretty much streams that are created by accounts that aren't owned by real people. So going back to the guy that bought a thousand Spotify accounts, he was using those to generate what are known as ghost streams. And Spotify does not like this. The reason that they are so actively against streaming fraud has nothing really to do with the undercode for artists who are putting themselves in front of these fake streams, but it has more so to do with what Spotify's payout, meaning the more that people manipulate their streams on Spotify, the more money they have to pay out into royalties. And if you follow Spotify pretty heavy, they're not the company that's even close to being in the most green. Like as big as Spotify is, they're still struggling to find a real net profit on everything that they're doing. So this is one of their top priorities because they look at it as a cuss caught down, right? Like if we can stop these people from creating these fake playlists, from creating these fake streams, then we can pay out artists who deserve more and we can stop paying our money that we shouldn't be paying out in the first place. Now, another part of the bill that falls into it is they want to actively get rid of pay to play on the platform. So this goes back to any of you that have done Spotify players promotion. Then you know that 99% of these curators are going to charge you for their placement, right? Whether it be for a certain slot, for a certain time period or just to listen to the song as a donation. Most of these curators have created playlists with the goal of charging you, the artists for those placements. And that is something else that Spotify is actively trying to stop. Once again, not because it's like the good Samaritan thing to do, but because they are pretty much, or at least the way I see it is they are trying to weed out competition that is actively growing streams for an artist causing them to have to pay out more money. Now, as a marketer, I'm all for this bill for the most part. Like I've been thinking, or I've been saying that Spotify needs a way to detect fraudulent streams, go streams and buy accounts since I started hopping into the playlists and gain, because it's one of those things where you really don't know if you're dealing with the fake playlists until it's too late until you've been in the playlists for a month or a week or even a day, or the person's already taking your money. And by that point, it's too late. Right? There's nothing you can do about it. So I'm all for that. Now the part about it that kind of, I won't say gets to me, but the part about it that kind of just raised a red flag was the stopping the pay to play. Now I personally believe that there's no true way to wipe out pay to play from the music industry. It's been here literally since the existence of the music industry. It's probably always going to be here. Someone's always going to take money in exchange for some type of service or promotion regarding that types of things. What I don't like about it is that they're going to actively treat or at least the way they worded it. They're going to treat people who pay to be in the playlist, whether it's legit or not the exact same way as they would someone who has knowingly used a fraudulent streaming source, meaning that if you're an artist and you have found a way into bot playlists or you found some type of system to manipulate your streams, Spotify, and if Spotify finds out, they're going to penalize you. They're going to either penalize you by taking your account down, taking that song down or worst case scenario, taking down your entire catalog. But also if you're an artist who let's say you find an influencer who owns a playlist, that playlist is legit and you pay for a placement into that playlist and Spotify finds out they're going to treat you the exact same way. They're going to treat you as if you bought fake streams and manipulated their platform, which I guess in the sense it is what you're doing, but in my mind it's not even remotely close to being the same. So like I said, I'm all for it in one sense and in another sense I'm kind of like, uh, I don't think the guidelines should be so black and white with that. I just, I just don't think this how it should be, but it's not my platform. So if you are someone that's using playlists, this is pretty much what you can expect to see over the next couple of months. Now Spotify is planning to start with a system wide purge, meaning that they want to go in and remove fake followers from the account, like fake profiles and they're going to actively be taken down playlists that they have deemed as fraudulent playlists. How they're going to determine that with system they're going to use. I don't know. Hopefully there's something that gets made to the public. So we can make those same assumptions, but that's what you're going to be seeing over the next couple of months. So if you have any playlists that you're suspicious of, if you've been looking at playlists that you're suspicious of, pay attention to them for the next couple of months and see which one starts to lose a drastic amount of followers or which ones just disappear completely. There to kind of give you a red flag on who you need to purge out of your contact list and who you need to stop keeping communications with. Now what's also going to happen because of this is the legit playlist curators, the legit user generated playlists curators are going to be so much harder to access because in a sense it's pretty much messing up their business, right? They can't just go around telling everyone they charged replacements because now they can be penalized for it. Their whole accounts can be taken down. So one is going to be a lot harder to even get in communication with these curators. And secondly, my guess is that their prices are going to skyrocket because now they can push to you to artists is, Hey, I still survive. I'm still here after this purge, meaning you know, my followers are legit. You know what I'm selling here is a premium service. And because of that, you're going to have to pay a premium price tag on this placement. That's kind of why I see everything going once they kind of get this code of practice pushed through and all that. So yeah, guys, that's pretty much why I wanted to touch on. I'll make sure to leave a link to the full article below so you can read the entire code so you can keep up with it. I love to hear you guys thoughts on this. If you read about it, let me know what you think in the comment section below. If this video is all you have, go read about it and then come back and comment and let me know what you think in the comment section below. Outside of that, guys, I want to let you know that I have put my full music video marketing course on my website. It pretty much teaches you the Google ad stuff, the Facebook marketing stuff, how to find influencers, how to find niche Instagram accounts to push your music video to a relevant audience. You can check that out in the link in the description below. If you want a little discount on it, go sign up for my email list. That link will also be in the description. I'll send you out a short code that you can use just as a big thanks for, you know, coming to key tabs with me and coming to key tabs in my newsletter. Now as always guys, if you feel like you learned anything today, please like and share this video, hit those post notifications as well as I wouldn't want you guys to miss anything. Once again, my name is Kobe and I'll see y'all next time.