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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Miranda Bryant Nordic correspondent

Danish man on trial over alleged £500k music streaming fraud

Bright blue headphones and lead seen on a pink background
A Danish association for composers, songwriters, lyricists and producers said the streams ‘could have been done by a computer program’ or devices ‘set to play the same songs on repeat’. Photograph: Krisanapong Detraphiphat/Getty Images

A Danish man has gone on trial in the city of Aarhus over accusations that he fraudulently made 4.38m kroner (more than £502,000) in royalties on music streaming sites, in what is thought to be the first such trial of its kind.

Prosecutors allege that the 53-year-old profited from streams of 689 pieces of music across services including Spotify, Apple Music and YouSee Musik. They say the huge numbers of streams required to generate that amount of money could not have been generated by genuine users and that unauthorised techniques were likely to have been deployed instead. The alleged fraud is understood to have happened between 2013 and 2019.

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