The Problems with SMM Panels

We’ve been testing virtually every SMM Panel offering on BHW recently over the past few weeks and we’ve come up with the following initial results.

To be honest, most of them are very sloppy in the service provision they provide. Some are good..most run by nice people but very poor service provision...because in the majority most are resellers and have no influence in actually correcting mistakes

For example with regards to Spotify Services. I spoke to most of them at the outset and informed them of one particular flaw in their Service supply and they’ve failed to pick up on it and as such most of not all of the people who book Spotify Services through these panels will either find their accounts not necessarily banned but under “notice” and certainly from hereon in won't get paid the royalties they think they will get.

The crazy this is that this flaw is so easy to fix and could be sorted very easily but I’m assuming the Resellers aren’t passing the information on or the main Service Suppliers just can’t be arsed fixing it which is criminal.

This is a symptom of the main issue. Many of the Tech Support for these panels are nice people but because they are resellers every support ticket you raise is met by the “I’ve sent your query onto our supplier”…god how much I would give to actually have a couple of actual suppliers and not resellers because it cuts down the links in a chain.

Lastly and I’m going to enclose a link here to an external article published recently which shows how Spotify and the major Music Labels are cracking down or going to crack down on SMM Suppliers or “Bot Farms”.

“Music Industry Targets Troll Farms Distorting Streaming”

https://www.ft.com/content/371b7b96-92e1-11e9-aea1-2b1d33ac3271

If you don’t address this problem properly then you are just going to continue to get your clients into trouble.

It could be however, an easy problem to fix?

S

As an addendum to the above. I've been approached by a number of folks regarding the above post and these fall roughly into two Camps. The first being.... "we've done and we've got away with it..we fly under the radar"..to which my response is well you'd better be getting to be quite a good Limbo dancer because that threshold has just got lower. For those who have been lucky to achieve payouts then you've done so because Spotify have not either had the man power or the motivation i.e you haven't triggered their radar to carry out an audit because once that happens its "bye bye" time.

Now what is moot at this time is what is the reaction and the actual long term position here i.e whether they choose to ban you outright or just cancel the payments, monitor and if you are spotted as a persistent offender then they carry out a ban? At the moment things are leaning towards the former as they'll use any excuse they can to reduce their payments burden and if you've been buying hooky streams then you are less likely to scream and shout prompting a more in depth analysis?

Either of which just goes to show that "the times they are a changing" folks and all of us need to clean up our acts if we wish to remain long term in this business which of course is s hame if ony the providers would actually do something pro active to fix this....and it's an easy fix