This Is Theft, Plain and Simple: Music's Biggest Labels and 24 Signatories Sign the Streaming Integrity Pact Against AI Fraud

The recorded music industry has drawn its clearest line yet against AI-driven streaming fraud. On September 14, 2026, IFPI — the global body representing the recorded music industry — launched the Streaming Integrity Initiative (SII), a cross-industry commitment to prevent, detect and respond to streaming fraud, backed at launch by all three major label groups and more than 20 distribution companies.

The signatory list reads like a map of the music business’s supply chain: Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group and Warner Music Group stand alongside South Korea’s HYBE, indie powerhouse Merlin, European trade body IMPALA, and distributors including ADA, AWAL, CD Baby, Ditto Music, FUGA, The Orchard, RouteNote, Symphonic, Secretly Distribution, Absolute Label Services, Virgin Music Group and others. Twenty-four organisations signed on day one.

Why now: the AI flood

Streaming fraud — manipulating digital music services to generate revenue from plays that are not genuine — is not new. What has changed is the industrial scale that generative AI now enables. Fraud schemes typically work in two steps: bad actors upload mass-produced tracks to streaming platforms through music distribution services, then deploy armies of bots to generate artificial plays that siphon money from royalty pools, diluting legitimate artists’ share.

The scale has become alarming. Deezer reported earlier this year that it now ingests almost 75,000 fully AI-generated tracks per day — roughly 44% of all daily uploads to the French streaming platform. AI-generated tracks show fraud rates far above the catalog average: detection vendors have found that up to 70% of streams on AI tracks are artificial. IFPI estimates streaming fraud now drains roughly $2 billion a year from the legitimate royalty pool, and some industry executives estimate that close to 10% of all music streams are fraudulent.

IFPI framed the moment plainly in its launch statement: “As technology evolves and AI-powered tools become more widely available, robust fraud prevention and detection measures and coordinated action across the music ecosystem are more important than ever.”

The five commitments

The initiative recognises that music distributors sit at the industry’s gateway — they supply the DSPs (digital service providers, i.e. the streaming platforms) with content, giving them a unique ability to stop fraudulent material before it ever reaches listeners. SII establishes a common baseline through five commitments. Participating distributors commit to:

1. Verify rights ownership and customer identities through robust rights verification and Know Your Customer (KYC) processes
2. Vet content using effective tools and processes to identify infringement, fraudulent activity and AI-related risks
3. Act by detecting, investigating and mitigating suspected fraud, including acting against repeat offenders
4. Share intelligence, where legally permissible, to help prevent bad actors from moving across services and platforms
5. Measure and continuously strengthen anti-fraud systems to address evolving threats

The commitments are designed, IFPI says, to strengthen prevention, improve detection, support enforcement action and increase collaboration across the industry. The four verbs — verify, vet, act, share — map directly onto the pain points the End Streaming Fraud campaign has been documenting since its launch, and the fifth acknowledges that this is an arms race, not a one-time fix.

“This is theft, plain and simple”

Victoria Oakley, CEO of IFPI, delivered the sharpest quote of the launch: “Streaming fraud misleads fans and deprives legitimate artists and songwriters of income that should rightfully flow to them. This is theft, plain and simple. We welcome the leadership shown by the first distributors to publicly support the Streaming Integrity Initiative, and hope this leads to direct, effective and coordinated action to protect artists, songwriters and fans from streaming fraud.”

Sarah McNabb, Merlin’s Director of Content Integrity, stressed that the commitments formalise what the indie sector already demands: “Tackling illegitimate activity effectively requires every part of the industry to move together. These commitments reflect Merlin’s own position and align closely with what Merlin already requires of its members.”

Helen Smith, IMPALA’s Executive Chair, tied the initiative to her organisation’s Digital Music Plan adopted earlier this year, which “identified industry collaboration on a new scale as a top priority” — with recommendations aimed at DSPs and labels as well as distributors.

Dr Jo Twist OBE, BPI chief executive, called streaming fraud “one of the key economic issues facing our industry” and warned: “The longer it goes unchecked, the harder it will be to eradicate fully from our music ecosystem. Rights-holders have stepped up, and we now need distributors, DSPs, and other stakeholders to match this commitment.”

Simon Wills, managing director of Absolute Label Services, rejected the idea that this can be fought reactively: “Combatting artificial streaming cannot be a reactive game of whack-a-mole, it demands intelligent, forward-looking technology paired with cross-industry collaboration. By integrating deep, multi-signal fraud detection into our music OS, Anthology, Absolute is enabling rightsholders to identify potential irregularities early.”

Context: a summer of AI rules

The SII does not land in a vacuum. It follows a combined effort by majors and independents this summer to set out global principles covering AI and chart eligibility — including ARIA’s decision to exclude AI-generated tracks from its charts from August 31. It also follows the first criminal conviction in a streaming-fraud case: Michael Smith pleaded guilty in March 2026 to wire fraud conspiracy over a bot farm operation, forfeiting over $8 million, and platforms have escalated penalties since — Apple Music flagged 2 billion fake streams in 2025 and doubled fraud penalties in February 2026.

The structural backdrop matters too. Streaming catalogs now hold over 250 million tracks, and analyses suggest 88% of them never clear Spotify’s payment threshold. When a fixed royalty pool is divided by an exploding denominator of synthetic tracks, every fraudulent stream does double damage: it takes money out and it dilutes what remains for human creators.

What to watch

The initiative’s success will hinge on execution details that are not yet public: what “effective tools” for AI-content vetting actually means in practice, how intelligence-sharing will work across competing distributors, and — the biggest open question — whether the streaming platforms themselves (Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Deezer) formally sign on. IFPI’s statement calls on “distributors, digital service providers, industry bodies and other stakeholders” to join, an implicit acknowledgment that the gateway pact is only the start.

For the AI industry, the message is more subtle. The music business is not banning AI-generated music — licensed AI deals like Universal’s partnership with ElevenLabs show a sanctioned path exists. What it is refusing to accept is industrial-scale synthetic content engineered to farm royalties. The Streaming Integrity Initiative is the industry’s first coordinated, global infrastructure response to that threat — and a template other content industries facing the same flood will likely study closely.