Apple Music Demonetizes Two Billion Fraudulent Streams, Recognizes AI-Driven Royalty Crisis

Apple Music recently disclosed that it identified and demonetized approximately two billion fraudulent streams over the course of 2025. The figure was made public by Oliver Schusser, Apple’s Vice President of Music, Video, Sports, and International, during a comprehensive interview with The Hollywood Reporter. The data underscores a systemic threat to the music industry’s royalty pools, as bad actors increasingly leverage generative AI to flood platforms with "synthetic" tracks designed solely to siphon payments away from human creators.

While the two-billion-stream figure encompasses various forms of manipulation, Schusser emphasized that the surge in AI-generated content is a primary catalyst. Unlike traditional "streaming farms" that used botnets to play a few tracks millions of times—making them easy to detect—modern fraudsters use AI to generate hundreds of thousands of unique, 31-second songs. By spreading a small number of bot-driven plays across a massive catalog of fake "artists," these operators attempt to stay below the detection thresholds of automated security systems.

Escalating the Financial War: New Penalty Thresholds

In response to this "industrial-scale" fraud, Apple Music announced that it has significantly increased its financial penalties for distributors. Since 2022, Apple has utilized a sliding penalty system that deducted between 5% and 25% of royalties from accounts linked to suspicious activity. Effective February 2, 2026, those penalties have been doubled, now ranging from 10% to 50%. Schusser noted that these adjustments are necessary to maintain the "integrity of the platform" and ensure that the finite pool of royalty payments reaches legitimate rights holders.

“Fraud in streaming is a growing concern. These adjustments reflect our efforts to protect artists, rights holders, and the integrity of the platform.” -Oliver Schusser

A Cross-Platform Epidemic

Apple is not alone in this struggle. In late January 2026, the French streaming service Deezer reported even more aggressive metrics, revealing that it had flagged and demonetized roughly 85% of AI-related streams on its platform. Deezer’s CEO, Alexis Lanternier, recently confirmed that the service is now receiving an average of 60,000 fully AI-generated tracks per day, accounting for nearly 40% of its daily intake. Meanwhile, other platforms such as Bandcamp are ruling AI out of their spaces altogether.

As the industry moves further into 2026, the focus is shifting toward "transparency tagging" and the licensing of specialized AI-detection tools—like the one Deezer has begun selling to other platforms. For Apple Music, the 2 billion stream disclosure serves as a warning shot to the industry: without more robust, cross-platform cooperation, the "AI-noise" could fundamentally break the economic model that supports professional musicians.