Streaming royalty fraud / artists can't prove or fight bot-inflated play counts

Pain point

Bot streaming is widespread; indie artists believe majors and platforms inflate numbers with impunity while one person gets jailed. Also distrust that royalty accounting is honest.

Signal

Moderate-strong. ~9.8k upvotes, 1,034-upvote comment alleging platform complicity, 90-upvote comment demanding bot-detection parity across all artists. Single thread but very specific, repeatable grievance.

Opportunity

Artist-side "Royalty Audit" SaaS — ingest distributor statements (DistroKid/TuneCore CSVs), flag anomalies, benchmark per-stream payout rates against cohort, and generate a dispute letter. Freemium, $10–25/mo. **Feasibility: medium** — statement parsing is easy; fraud detection without DSP log access is hard, so lead with payout-rate transparency.

Evidence

• meirl — streaming bot fraud