Guide · 5 min read
Spotify’s €10 artificial streaming fee: who pays, and what distributors do about it
The fee Spotify charges for artificial streams, the 90% threshold behind it, and what TuneCore, FUGA, CD Baby, Amuse and UnitedMasters publish about passing it on.
What Spotify charges, and who it charges
Spotify charges labels and distributors €10 per track per month when it detects flagrant artificial streaming. Flagrant means more than 90% of a track’s streams are flagged. The policy has applied since 1 April 2024.
Spotify bills the distributor, so whether you pay depends on your distributor’s terms. The streams are affected too: royalties on flagged streams can be withheld and stream counts corrected.
What distributors publish
Each distributor describes its own handling. These are the ones with public pages we could read:
- TuneCore: charges the fee to your balance or payment method, itemised by track, and says an account can be shut down at scale.
- FUGA: deducts it from the next royalty cycle and shows it on the self-billing invoice. It describes a zero-tolerance policy and expects the client to investigate where a flagged track was played.
- UnitedMasters: shows a negative “Spotify Artificial Streaming Penalty Fee” line in the artist Wallet. The transaction is the notification.
- CD Baby: deducts roughly $10 to $11 per track from your balance, and says a flag often leads to the release being removed, with catalogue-wide removal possible in severe cases.
- Amuse: takes 10 EUR per recording per month from your Amuse wallet and lists track removal and, for repeated violations, account closure.
What the pages do not say
None of these pages promises to tell you which playlist produced the flagged streams. The notice names the track, and the search for the source is left to you. DistroKid and Ditto publish their own policies on artificial streaming too, so read the page for your own distributor to see what it says about fees and closures.
How to reduce the risk
The surest way to lower the risk is to avoid streams you cannot account for. Check a playlist before you pay for a slot, ask the curator for their Spotify for Artists audience data, and be wary of any promotion that guarantees a number of streams. Spotify has a support page on third-party services that guarantee streams.
If you already hold a notice, the previous two guides in this series cover what to do and how to find the placements involved.
FAQ
Does Spotify charge artists the artificial streaming fee?
Spotify charges labels and distributors, not artists directly. Many distributors pass the fee on, for example by taking it from your balance, so check your distributor’s own terms.
What counts as flagrant artificial streaming?
Spotify uses a threshold of more than 90% of a track’s streams flagged as artificial in the period. The fee has applied since 1 April 2024.
Can the fee be avoided?
You avoid it by not having a large share of a track’s streams come from artificial sources. Check playlists before paying for placement, and avoid services that guarantee stream numbers.
Does my distributor have to tell me which playlist caused it?
The public policy pages we read do not promise this. Spotify’s reports name the affected tracks, and distributors such as FUGA expect clients to investigate where the track was played.
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