Fraud is one of the toughest challenges facing the music industry today. Fake streams, identity fraud, and misallocated royalties siphon billions from the ecosystem every year. But music isn’t the first industry to face these problems, and it doesn’t need to fight them alone. Finance, aviation, and digital advertising have all battled fraud at scale, and the lessons they’ve learned can help music move faster.
In digital advertising, click fraud and other schemes constitute a multi-billion-dollar problem. Reputable estimates suggest $68B in global digital ad spend was lost to fraud in 2022. Fraudsters use bots or hijacked devices to mimic real users and generate fake ad clicks, draining budgets while making campaigns look more effective than they are.
Ad networks have fought back by having platforms pool intelligence and align on standards so multiple companies can detect the same bad actors. A leading example is the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), a global initiative dedicated to fighting fraud and promoting transparency in digital advertising. TAG takes a collaborative, industry‑wide approach, helping companies stay ahead of emerging threats and maintain the integrity of the ecosystem.
The results are telling. TAG reports that Certified Against Fraud (CAF) channels maintained invalid traffic rates of less than 1% globally in 2024.
It also launched a Pirate Domain Exclusion List to help advertisers avoid placing ads on pirate sites, and its Data Center IP List flagged more than 104 million high‑risk IP addresses in a single year.