Apple Music demonetised 2 billion fraudulent streams in 2025 – that’s nearly $17 million in royaltiesApple Music demonetised a whopping two billion fraudulent music streams last year according to its chief, Oliver Schusser.
The streaming platform introduced fraud penalties back in 2022, with those caught facing a fee calculated on what would’ve been royalties. These fees started at five percent and were capped at 25 percent, but those figures are now due to double, The Hollywood Reporter reveals.

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The outlet also states that a royalty calculator from the law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips suggests that the 2 billion fraudulent streams that were tackled in 2025 represent nearly $17 million in royalties that could have been taken from real artists if not prevented.
In his interview with THR, Schusser says, “Streaming manipulation on our platform is already incredibly low. We literally have systems where we check and validate every single play on Apple Music. When we find fraud we remove the stream counts, we remove from the charts, and we take the money and put it back into the pool so that it goes to honourable artists…
“Still, we have removed billions of manipulated streams from the service in 2025 alone. This is a huge problem in the industry, people want to be number one in the charts. They want to make it into playlists. Despite that, you’re still talking about billions of manipulated streams, just in last year alone.”
He later adds, “We look at ourselves as a quality platform, and we don’t like it when people cheat, and we like to give it back to those who don’t cheat. It’s really as simple as that.”
This news follows on from updated figures from Deezer, which reveal that around 60,000 new AI tracks are uploaded to its platform every day (around 39 percent).
It says that over 13.4 million AI tracks have been tagged using its detection system launched in June last year. Up to 85 percent of those have been marked as fraudulent, and subsequently removed from the royalty pool. Deezer is now considering licensing the technology behind its AI tagging system to other brands and platforms.
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