Which music streaming platform is delivering the most reliable data on play counts? In a surprising turn of events, SoundCloud has emerged as the leader in Legitary’s latest DSP transparency and accuracy rankings, surpassing industry giants Spotify and Apple Music.
Based on Legitary’s aggregated ‘Anomaly Scores’ for music streaming platforms over the entire 2023 period, the latest ranking evaluates the accuracy and transparency of reporting practices among digital service providers (DSPs). Platforms that wildly misreport stream counts have high Anomaly Scores and lower rankings, while more accurate platforms carry lower scores and higher rankings.
Legitary, an AI-powered auditing company based in Vienna, Austria, has recently emerged as a serious player in the streaming music monitoring and oversight space. The company’s analyses are proving critical to major content owners who need to ensure accurate reporting and payments from DSPs.
To date, Legitary has scanned and monitored billions of streams across dozens of DSPs worldwide, analyzing anomalies and aberrations for content owners. The result: lots of streams are found to be overcounted or undercounted and require further investigation or corrections.
Just last year, Spotify trumped Legitary’s transparency list, though stream-count accuracy and reporting have become a separate competitive arena. Enter SoundCloud, which lags far behind Spotify and Apple Music in terms of subscribers and revenues but currently boasts the most accurate stream counting in the business.
Rounding out the bottom is TikTok, a chronic underachiever. But Legitary noted that TikTok is a highly viral platform, which introduces unique challenges to tracking large—and often short-lived—spikes in song plays.
Here’s Legitary’s latest ranking of the top 10 DSPs worldwide based on overall transparency and reporting accuracy.
Outside the top three, other platforms experienced mixed results.
Deezer and Apple Music showed significant improvements in their reporting accuracy. However, YouTube’s ranking declined, and TikTok remained among the lowest performers. This indicates ongoing inconsistencies in reporting practices across the industry, though unfortunately, TikTok has been a consistently low performer in Legitary’s rankings.
Legitary’s CEO, Nermina Mumic, emphasized the importance of transparent and reliable reporting. “This year’s ranking reaffirms that innovation and a commitment to quality can disrupt even the most established players,” Mumic shared. “Transparent and reliable reporting is the cornerstone of a sustainable future for the music industry.”
Digging Deeper into the Legitary Data
To understand the rankings, it’s essential to delve into Legitary’s methodology. The company’s Anomaly Score focuses on measuring the magnitude of significant under- or over-performances for each DSP relative to its total stream counts. These issues occur when reported streaming numbers are significantly lower or higher than what would be expected based on historical data and other available information, such as streaming behavior on other platforms or in different countries.
While the exact factors that separated the top three DSPs remain unclear due to the close competition, some key takeaways emerge. The consistent presence of ‘bad’ actors at the bottom and better performers at the top of the rankings suggests that reporting quality and monitoring varies significantly among DSPs.
Additionally, the rankings demonstrate that smaller DSPs can match or even exceed the reporting accuracy of larger platforms. Regardless, Mumic expressed the hope that every DSP boat will continue to elevate their games and deliver more accurate reporting and payouts to rights owners in the future.
“Reports like our latest DSP ranking underscore the critical need for transparent analyses of streaming data to ensure accountability and fair compensation in the music industry,” Mumic said. “In the end, we are all part of the same ecosystem, and only through collective efforts can we continue to elevate the integrity of our industry.”