Apple Music cracks down on streaming fraud, demonetizing two billion fraudulent streams in 2025
New penalties, royalties being returned to real artists, and what needs to be done next as Apple Music sharpens its fights against streaming fraud.
Speaking recently with The Hollywood Reporter, Apple’s Vice President of Music Oliver Schusser revealed the scale of Apple Music’s ongoing fight against streaming manipulation. Alongside the huge numbers of fraudulent streams detected in 2025, the platform is also putting new penalties in place for those who get caught trying to game the system.
Two billion fraudulent streams
During the conversation, Schusser revealed that Apple Music “identified and demonetized as many as 2 billion fraudulent streams” on the platform last year. While that seems like a lot, fraudulent activity on Apple Music represents less than 0.5% of total listening, and was revealed to be closer to 0.3% last year. So, in the wider context, fraudulent streaming is still a relatively small slice of listening on Apple Music.
Using MusicAlly’s logic, if 2 billion fraudulent streams represents roughly 0.5% of Apple Music’s total streams, it could mean that Apple Music racks up about 400 billion streams annually. Although this information doesn’t necessarily add anything, it’s cool to know how many streams Apple Music gets, even if it is a very rough estimate.
How Apple Music handles fraudulent streams
A small percentage or not, Apple Music is still tackling the problem head on. The platform adopts systems that “check and validate everyday single play”. When streams are flagged as fraudulent, Apple Music removes those streams and removes those tracks from charts.
Crucially, the royalties earned from those plays don’t stay with whoever tried to game the system. Instead, they go back into the overall revenue pool, meaning that cash tied to fake listening gets redistributed to genuine artists.
Penalties for streaming fraud are getting tougher
Apple Music redistributes those royalties thanks to financial penalties on fraudulent streaming, which have been in place since 2022. The platform uses a sliding scale of fines on the royalties associated with fraudulent streams. Previously, penalties ranged from 5% to 25% which are now being doubled to 10% to 50%.
In real terms, that means if someone manipulated streams to generate $1 million, they could now face penalties of up to $500,000. By doing so, Apple Music has taken millions of royalties from those cheating the system and given them back to the revenue pool for real artists.
What about AI?
AI-generated music often comes up in discussions around streaming fraud, with Deezer revealing that 70% of AI-generated music streams on its platform were fraudulent last year.
But when questioned about AI, Schusser insisted that Apple Music won’t be following in Bandcamp’s footsteps of banning AI music outright. In fact, Apple Music will continue using AI to enhance its own streaming services, like they’ve already done with features such as AutoMix.
Instead, he pointed to the that the bigger industry issue is defining what AI actually is:
“Is it the songwriting? Is it the making of music? Is it just the vocals? I would encourage the labels to actually get together and figure out what the industry’s views and policies on that would be.”
What this means moving forward
Different platforms currently have varying policies when it comes to streaming fraud and AI. But, the direction of travel is clear. At some point sooner or later, the industry will need to outline clear and consistent policies around what is or isn’t allowed.
In all of that, Apple Music’s stance is clear. It wants to focus on being a quality streaming platform that prioritizes real listeners over streaming manipulation, and gives more of the pie back to artists who genuinely earn it.