Q: Is it really ok for a company to fine a contractée without any type of proof that a violation was their fault?
In March 2024, my music distributor notified me that Spotify had notified them that one of my songs had breeched Spotify's "90% or greater artificial steam" threshold and that they had fined my distributor 10 Euro as a result. As a follow-on result my distributor then fined me 10 Euro, plus a 5 Euro processing fee plus VAT, totaling around 18.15 Euro, which I was to pay them under the presumption that I as the song's author was guilty of this artificial streaming activity. Spotify did, indeed, provide the distributor with an Excel file showing that, according to Spotify (and no one else) that my song did, indeed, receive 68 artificial streams compared to 3 actual playings. What Spotify _didn't do_ is to provide ANY evidence that -> I <- or my distributor was the cause of these artificial streams.
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