The music industry has a long, proud history of developing, implementing and honing innovative, imaginative and occasionally ingenious ways of, erm, well, scamming the system, so it looks like the pop tunes you’re peddling are a fuck load more popular than they really are. But no more, people! Because now there’s a code of conduct to stamp out “stream manipulation”.
With the shift to streaming, of course, entirely new innovative, imaginative and occasionally ingenious ways of scamming the system were developed, implemented and honed. Which led to much chatter about certain specific ruses used to manipulate the number of streams being recorded for any one track. Ruses that usually involve employing people or machines to log into multiple accounts on the streaming platforms and give certain recordings lots of extra plays.