Photo Credit: Fábio Alves
Watching your artist following grow on Spotify can be one of the most rewarding aspects of growing your online music presence—but also one of the most frustrating. If your Spotify follower count dropped overnight, read on for some potential reasons it happened.
Spotify regularly monitors its service for bot followers, artificial streams, and other forms of fakery that can impact legitimate artists. Bot followers are the easiest to detect because they don’t follow normal music-listening patterns. Services that offer to increase your Spotify following for a fee are often selling bot followers—which will then be purged once Spotify detects the artificial activity.
As an artist, you should NEVER spend money on any service that promises to increase your Spotify following. Legitimate advertising on social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok are all valid ways to increase your following—but paying for a service that promises a certain amount of followers for a certain amount of money (ex. 1,000 followers for $10) is a great way to waste money.
These 1,000 followers will be added to your account, but Spotify will detect them as bot followers eventually and remove them. Whether that happens the day after you purchase or six months down the road is the gamble—but they will be removed.
Spotify regularly engages in bot purges of followers to keep artist numbers genuine. One of the ways Spotify can identify these bot followers is that they don’t actually interact with any of your music in an organic way.
Spotify has very specific mechanisms in place to detect suspicious or fraudulent streaming activity. Any artist or playlist suspected in engaging in buying followers or boosting streams artificially may have their royalties withheld from them.
Spotify has an entire team of suspicious behavior experts that examine suspected artificial streaming activity and bot followers. Spotify may reach out to you if it believes you’re engaging in hiring bot followers or paying bots to stream your music.
“Spotify is definitely doing a clean-up,” one artist told Digital Music News about the action. “A few months ago I had a track that was clearly added to a botted playlist (WAVR.AI) without my knowledge and ended up getting something like 1000 plays on the track in a day and 100 followers, according to my artist stats. I figured this was fake and, as my suspicion confirmed, I noticed those 100 followers were removed when I looked at my artist data today.”
What to do if your music is added to a suspected bot playlist?
If you’ve noticed your music has been added to a playlist that you suspect of botting artificial streams, there’s not much you can do. Spotify routinely conducts sweeps of free accounts to determine whether or not they are legitimate users. Like the artist who spoke to us, you may find yourself suddenly down several hundred followers if your music was the target of a botting playlist.
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