Mystery tracks being 'forced' on your Spotify

    racking up thousands of listens and
    (perhaps) hundreds of pounds

I thought artists earn something like $5 per 1000 plays these days?

I was hacked because at the time I set up a free account I used an old default password I'm pretty sure shows up in a leaked dataset. I suddenly noticed messages showing up that someone played music from a device I don't own. I changed my password and deleted all offline devices. It's entirely my fault, still it's odd that spotify wouldn't notify me of suspicious behaviour, since they kind of pay for it too.

Reused passwords that appears in breaches maybe?

Funny, to me this sounds like a hash collision. (For a map key, not the cryptographic kind.)

Knowing only that Spotify is a large distributed system, and seeing that the mystery tracks are short in title and length, as well as plentiful, it feels like a these tracks are ending up as collisions in a distributed hash table.

From there it'd be a matter of bubbling up top due to sorting order properties.

Doesn't seem to be the case, as people have already tried changing their password.

From the article: >On Reddit, Callum Dixon wrote: "The same Bergenulo Five keeps being played on my account and I've tried everything - changed my password, logged out of everywhere. I can't stop it!"