Piedmont Boys, Cam Pierce Albums Pulled Amid False Streaming Fraud Claims
It happened again, and the fear is it could continue to happen more frequently as the dystopian reality surrounding digital music continues to deepen, and the lack of a human element to help anyone results in musicians having their music pulled off of streaming services unfairly. And since independent artists don’t have the same resources or representatives as major label artists, this issue is affecting them disproportionately.
The problem starts when an artist or band is falsely accused of paying for streams—a ludicrous assertion when you see the cumulative spins and revenue some of these bands are attempting to live on. Most certainly, deep pocket artists and management companies manipulating or paying for streams is a very serious problem, resulting in the streaming services and distributors needing to crack down. But the often punitive and immediate results of pulling music under the suspicion of the activity is creating collateral damage in the independent music space.
The latest victim is the beloved independent country band from North Carolina, The Piedmont Boys. When Saving Country Music reviewed their album Almost Home in 2020, the conclusion was, “The Piedmont Boys are a pure Carolina version of Outlaw country that honky tonk fans all around the world should be spinning.” But unless you’re one of the few lucky ones with a physical copy of the album, it’s currently un-spinnable.
“We got the ‘Artificial Streaming Notice’ on 8/20/2025 from TuneCore who is our distributor,” explains Piedmont Boys frontman Greg Payne. “They pulled ‘Almost Home’ from all stores that day. It basically said that one of our songs ‘Boomerang’ was flagged for high levels of artificial streaming. Therefore they are taking it down from ALL STORES. Not only did they take that one song down but the entire album. We don’t really sell hard copies anymore so basically all those songs don’t exist until we somehow get the album back up.”
One recurring theme when this issue arises is not being able to access any sort of human to help rectify the situation. This was the same issue underground country artist Slackeye Slim faced earlier this year, who also used the service TuneCore to upload his music. Hearing the horror stories from other artists, he pulled his catalog off of streaming preemptively after receiving numerous notices about artificial streams.
“Spotify and TuneCore have absolutely ZERO customer service except going back and forth with a robot on a chat page,” explains Greg Payne. “We’re frustrated to say the least and concerned that this will keep happening to us and many others if something is not done about it.”
For artists like The Piedmont Boys and Slackeye Slim, losing their already meager streaming revenue is significant, while it also makes it harder to reach new fans.
“We work hard to stay as relevant as we can in whatever scene we fit in but when they take our music off every music outlet we basically don’t exist,” Greg Payne says. “We have NEVER paid a dime to get more streams. In fact, I’ve always taken pride in the fact that everything we have, whether it be streams, social media likes or whatever, has been achieved 100% organically.”
Another independent country artist, Cam Pierce, also had one of his albums pulled on Spotify in August. A Thousand Lonely Horses made it only Saving Country Music’s Best Albums So Far for 2025, but is currently all greyed out on Spotify due another erroneous claim of paid-for streams. “$potify pulled my record for absolutely unsubstantiated and erroneous claims that I was using AI to boost streams,” Pierce said.
Saving Country Music has reached out to TuneCore for comment. But just like the artists, a real human can’t be reached. The Piedmont Boys plan on attempting to upload the album using a different service in the future.
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September 6, 2025 @ 8:19 am
Same thing happened to Anna Wescoat with her album “World Famous”. She saved up money for years to make that album and put her heart into it.
So far no one will help.
September 6, 2025 @ 8:58 am
Sucks to hear. I am sure there are many other independent artists out there this is happen to, and they don’t even have the resources to get their voices heard to complain about it.
September 6, 2025 @ 9:13 am
Fuuuuuuck that sucks. She’s a fantastic artist.
I mean not that it matters. It’s not a matter of talent, this is happening to people all across the spectrum and like trigger says, Independent artists have no recourse.
Only thing I’d add to this article is that often the cause of the inflated streaming claim are fraudsters, not mainstream labels. I’m sure there are lots of Payola type shenanigans with mainstream labels and streaming, and you can learn about it in Liz Pelly’s book about Spotify, Mood Machine.
Go buy people’s music, people. Even if you don’t listen to physical Media or MP3s right now, it’s a good cheap way to tip artists you like whose ability to put out albums is otherwise threatened from all sides
September 6, 2025 @ 9:18 am
What I mean is that the people doing the actual stream inflating are often unrelated to the music of the people who are getting accused of inflating streams. Triggers past articles about this covered it but basically, fraudsters will put together a random playlist with some legitimate artists on it as well as AI tracks or human artists they’re trying to inflate, and then use bot farms to create artificially inflated streaming numbers. This was a serious problem with AI music in particular because that just opened the door wide open to fraud. It ends up affecting Independent artists at random and like the article says, there’s not much you could do about it. The whole system is super arbitrary and shitty like so much of the tech industry today.
Support the artist you like, people. Just listenjng to them via streaming doesn’t do it.
September 6, 2025 @ 9:15 am
Trigger, if any of these folks who have been mentioned have their music available for sale on bandcamp or elsewhere, could you edit a link into the article?
Slackeye Slim originally pulled his music and then eventually went with a different distributor which means all of his old links across the internet are dead, which is a pretty big deal as far as discoverability of any particular song or artist.
But his stuff was still on bandcamp. That system works differently than the distributor system that you are forced into with other streaming services, even though bandcamp also does some streaming.
September 6, 2025 @ 10:12 am
It’s crazy to me that distributors and streaming platforms will flag stuff like this, and AI bands go completely unchecked.
September 6, 2025 @ 10:56 am
I know what you think of Zac Brown Band’s recent music, but I strongly recommend listening to their brand new song with Dolly Parton. It’s genuinely really good.
September 6, 2025 @ 12:34 pm
As someone who also is engrossed in EDM (I know: quite the juxtaposition from what country intrinsically is 😊)…………..singer/songwriter/producer KARRA just released a YouTube video between two and three weeks ago about her own music being pulled from Spotify and other streaming platforms with no warning nor opportunity to dispute the claims that she bought fake streams or underwent other manipulative tactics to boost her streaming numbers, and she goes into detail breaking down what drew her to music in the first place, her motivation to pursue music as a dream, and the numerous obstacles she encountered in pursuing a path as an independent solo artist.
This has become a worrying commonplace assumption across broad swaths of the industry and, much like KARRA has ruled out ever promoting her music on digital platforms again, more artists like The Piedmont Boys and Cam Pierce may find they may need to shift priorities to YouTube exclusively or other platforms as infuriating as all of this is.
September 6, 2025 @ 12:45 pm
Come October 30, after a long delay, we will finally be able to dig into the album ‘Men without Hair’ by Harry Baldwin, the legendary underground hero from Anchorage, Alaska.
The (teaser) single ‘You, Me and Someone in Between’, a duet with ms. Harriet Beaver, is a stone cold classic.