Musiccosmos

A Bulgarian scam cost music platform Spotify a potential $1m in royalties in 2017. That’s the verdict of sources in a report from Music Business Worldwide. The Bulgarian operation is as yet unidentified, and could well be an individual rather than a group. It allegedly uploaded a number of third-party playlists, created numerous fake Spotify accounts to improve their play counts, and “earned” money from Spotify’s percentage-based pay scheme. Not a single law broken An executive from a top music label first realised what was going on in September of last year in the music platform’s regular revenue roundups, which are sent out to members of the industry. It was too late to do anything about it at that point, however. Nicholas Crouch, fraud prevention expert from Scams.info , tells us the really crazy part: they didn’t break a single law! Eventually, Spotify traced the two playlists back to an operation running out of Bulgaria. The tracing took place with ISRC codes (a world-wide sy...