“Apple Music is doubling its penalties to content providers who are caught engaging in streaming fraud, the service confirms to The Hollywood Reporter, in a move that the platform’s chief Oliver Schusser says reflects Apple Music’s goals of outright ending streaming fraud on the platform. Schusser, who also oversees TV+ and Sports, tells THR that”, — write: www.hollywoodreporter.com
Schusser, who also oversees TV+ and Sports, tells THR that even with a fraud stream rate of less than half a percent, the platform had identified and demonetized as many as 2 billion fraudulent streams last year, which according to a royalty calculator from the law firm Manatt Phelps & Phillips, represents nearly $17 million in royalties that would’ve been taken from legitimate artists.
Apple Music introduced fraud penalties back in 2022, where along with demonetizing the illegitimate streams themselves, the company employed a sliding scale of fining fraudsters a fee calculated on what would’ve been royalties. The fee started at 5 percent and capped at 25 percent. Starting Sunday, all those figures double, from 10 percent to a cap of 50 percent. In layman’s terms, if you engage in streaming fraud amounting to say, $1 million, you’d be fined a maximum of $500,000.
“This is a zero-sum game,” Schusser says of streaming fraud. “I would like to live in a world where we have zero fraud on the platform, and this has been a very effective tool. Increasing the penalties takes the money from people who are cheating and puts it back into the system for those who aren’t.”
The move comes amid a major proliferation of AI music on streaming services. Earlier this week, the French streaming service Deezer reported that it’s now seeing 60,000 AI songs uploaded on the platform every day, which represents 39 percent of all daily uploads delivered on the service. It’s empowered fraud significantly with as much as 85 percent of the streams on AI songs on the platform being fraudulent, Deezer said.
Speaking with THR just before the Grammys, Schusser detailed Apple’s new fraud policy and how the AI music influenced the decision, as well as even through the polarizing reception from conservatives, why Bad Bunny was the right choice for the upcoming Super Bowl Halftime Show.
So tell me about the fraud update Apple will be implementing.
We’ve always prioritized being the highest quality service, hence the push with Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio. An important part of that behind the scenes is fraud and how we eliminate it and reduce streaming manipulation. 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 honorable artists. That’s a result of sort of the security we’ve built, the security we also have in iOS and the investments we make in technology.
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 the last year alone. And we really felt like the penalty had helped in 2022.
The obvious question: why now?
It’s really just to focus on quality, that’s all it is. 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. There’s no magic between this particular date, but it felt like something that is incredibly popular in the industry and with the community. When we implemented the first fraud policy, it was very popular with the industry, and it proved effective.
The only sort of change we’ve had since then is the advent of AI and more AI content. A lot of that could be pushed with streaming manipulation. I wanted to make sure that in the advent of there are incentives not to do that.
With all this AI music coming up, do you think the plays are usually legitimate or is it mainly just a vehicle to game the system?
it’s too easy to say there’s one answer to this, there really isn’t. Even without AI, there’s a lot of music being made that no one’s listening to. There’s definitely a curiosity and interest in part because of press and social media on AI content. I’m sure some of the listening is legitimate, but for us, it’s really important for what is not legitimate, to do everything we can to detect it. that has nothing to do with AI. It’s just that with AI, there’s more quantities.
Do you have a timeline in mind for increased reductions on fraud with that goal of getting to zero in mind?
Well, our goal is just to make it smaller and smaller and smaller, and technology and ideas like this are a solution to that. Most of our competitors are really struggling with this. I mean, it’s a bit of Whack a Mole. Whenever there’s a big business, and streaming is a big business, you find people who come in and want to game the system.
What we have with Apple Music, it’s the strength of iOS and our security in general and that we want music to be editorialized — we don’t rely solely on algorithms, there’s no checks and balances if it’s all based on an algorithm. I think that puts us in a great position to make Apple Music a high-quality platform.
I’m sure the tech contributes here but really, I’d imagine your fraud rates are lower because you don’t have a free tier for users so it costs more for entry.
Well, you obviously know my view on free music. We’ve never done it. This is one of the problems. That’s one of the problems. You’ve got the wrong incentives in the market about people trying to get number one songs and charts, this, and that. It’s not good for our ecosystem, and it’s certainly not something we stand for.
Going back to quality and editorial, in regard to AI, how does Apple Music view that on the platform. BandCamp announced this month it’s banning AI music. Can you talk about Apple’s policy on AI?
Well first of all, let’s start with AI as a software. Some of our features like AutoMix, that’s actually possible because of AI. we’ll continue to use AI to make our product better and create wonderful and delightful features for our customers.
But as a music industry, I think we’ve got a lot of work to do to define what AI is. Is it the songwriting? Is it the making of music? Is it just the vocals? I would encourage the labels to actually get together and figure out what the industry’s views and policies on that would be. What we’re doing is developing internal technology to understand the music and help listening.
We have all the knowledge on our side, and that feeds into our editorial and to our editors who have put together our playlists and recommendations. But the industry has a lot of work to do in this space, and I would encourage everyone to come together and talk about it.
On another topic, the Super Bowl is soon. We’re four years into Apple Music being the lead sponsor. Tell me about how that has evolved for the platform.
We see the Super Bowl as an extension of what we do with artist relations. We want to be there in support for the artists, and in this case, on the biggest stage they’re ever on. Our goal when we partnered with the NFL and Roc Nation was to help make the halftime show better, more global and bigger. We’ve obviously had record shows ever since in the three years since, and the interest for bad bunny since we announced him in September has been off the charts.
Is there any insight you can give on Bad Bunny’s selection? Roc Nation picks the talent, are you involved in any way?
It was one of the reasons why we’re interested in working with the NFL, was the fact that Jay Z and Roc Nation were their production partner. We wanted it that way, and we were very well aware that Jay Z and his team pick the artists. That doesn’t mean that we’re not talking to them on a regular basis about things that we’re seeing, both in culture as well as on our platform, we have a very, very close relationship with them, but we’re very zen and very happy with the fact that this is their choice.
Look at the last four years, I think we’ve collectively knocked it around the park between Rihanna, then Usher was bigger than Rihanna. Kendrick Lamar, I think we had a real Zeitgeist last year following those Grammy wins. We really knocked it out of the park, it was one of the biggest moments in TV history. Bad Bunny globally is off the charts. If there’s one thing maybe that the last two years had some room to grow, it was actually outside the United States. Now we have an artist that has a phenomenal following in Latin America, Europe and so on.
Are you surprised with what the response has been with the political backlash? Were you expecting Bad Bunny to be so polarizing?
At this stage, at this level, which is as big as it gets worldwide, it’s impossible for Roc Nation to choose an artist that everyone would be happy with. Think about last year. You can go back to some comments last year, and I think it’s just the nature of it being that you’re playing to the world. This is what makes this so unique, and why I think Roc Nation should get so much credit.
It’s really hard, and they have repeatedly done an incredible job at picking the right artist at the right moment. But you know, you could play this game yourself. Pick any artist that you would actually put on that stage, and then imagine, will 100 percent of the people be happy with that artist? I’m very proud to be working with them on this, and they made a great choice.
Keeping up with sports, how are you prepping for Apple TV’s F1 debut?
We’re super excited. The first practice is on March 6. It’s in Melbourne, so we’re less than two months away. You’ve seen we’ve been involved already. Red Bull, for example, in Detroit the other day, announcing their car. Ferrari have announced their car. We’ve been very visible on site when some of these things happen. We’re ramping up our kind of production. We’ll have a big push a couple weeks before the race. F1 the movie has been the biggest movie we’ve ever done. So we have a great understanding of the sport, and we have a lot of people in our platform that love the sport.
If you’re an F1 fan, I think you’ll I think you’ll be blown away by what the experience was last year versus the experience we’ll bring you in terms of the quality of the production this year.
I can’t say I’m a regular F1 viewer but I do watch quite a bit of baseball. There were conversations about Apple losing the MLB games but then the announcement came and you’re keeping them. Can you talk about how that happened?
I can keep it very simple. Friday Night Baseball is coming back to Apple TV at the start of the season, and we’re excited to continue working with MLB. It’s been it’s been awesome, they’re a great partner, and our apple TV subscribers are loving it.