[Keeping Tempo With Music Biz] — Fraud Is Eating the Time We Should Spend on Music: Op-Ed from limbo/Beat’s Fer Isella

The last time I went to a music industry conference in London, colleagues from across the B2B supply chain were there: music tech companies like limbo/, and distributors & record labels with outstanding quality and curation. On stage and in the hallways, the most repeated complaint was the same: our internal anti-fraud quality control processes are costing us time, energy, and money.

No, it wasn’t AI. The day-to-day problem was quality control against fraud in the forms of artificial streaming and false copyright claims.

I felt a certain weariness in the room. Challenges like this one genuinely excite me, and they excite all of us at limbo/. They are the things we suffer through, the new problems of this blessed industry we love, and we usually turn them into smart, simple, practical solutions with our tool of choice: technology.

We have suffered with this problem too, and to a large extent we have solved it for our clients through our new partnership, limbo/Beat – a spin-off of limbo/ and Beat Mobile, two Argentine companies with more than 20 years at the crossroads of music and technology worldwide.

In London I saw colleagues with different solutions, putting pieces together to tackle audio, metadata and cover art issues. What I didn’t see was a shared set of criteria. That is exactly why spaces like Merlin and the Music Fights Fraud Alliance are so necessary: places where we can collaborate to fight the problems that hurt us most, the ones that take human time away from creativity.

And much of this fight is decided at our door – the distributor’s door. A platform sees a track once it is already live. The distributor sees it before anyone else, knows who uploaded it, has a contract with that person, and can say no before a single stream is counted. When Spotify announced it had removed more than 75 million spam tracks in a year, it said it was working with distributors to stop them “at the source.” We are that source.

This problem shouldn’t be solved by a battalion of humans reviewing releases and preventively spotting possible fraud before the music reaches the DSPs. It is inhuman, thankless, mechanical, robotic work, with as many edges as the new requirements the DSPs publish, which change almost every month. Innovating? Finding ways for fans to keep listening to the music they love? Testing what this industry will look like in the age of generative AI? Yes to all of it. But always while fighting a practice that has become professional: well-organized players, people and companies alike, dedicated to every kind of fraud.

And they won’t stop us. We are ready to find innovative solutions and take a proactive role. We would also like more support from the DSPs, so we can fight together against a problem that runs through the veins of the daily operations of these huge technology companies – the music platforms.

“Hard on the problem, soft on the people” is a motto I use every week. That’s why I believe we have to attack this problem at the root, and in the meantime use our collective intelligence and every tool technology gives us today.

At limbo/Beat, our quality control agent runs more than 35 checks on audio, cover art and metadata, aligned with the content policies and best practices recommended by the content integrity teams of the major DSPs and by organizations like Merlin and the Music Fights Fraud Alliance. The agent detects; a person decides. And it is not a taste filter. We don’t judge whether the music is good; we check that it is what it says it is.

On January 11th, Music Biz and the Music Fights Fraud Alliance will bring the industry back together at NYU for the Trust & Safety in Music Symposium. I hope we can stay united in this shared fight so that the next time we meet at an industry conference, we can put the culture of independent, human music at the center of the conversation, instead of spending so much time, effort and human energy on a problem that has nothing to do with growing this industry and that, on the contrary, works against all of us.

Action!

Written by: Fer Isella, Co-founder & CEO of limbo/Beat

You can read past Keeping Tempo’ articles via the portal linked here. And, stay tuned for more insightful discussions from our members and partners from across the industry!