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An odd discovery on Spotify

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Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#61

Post by kixiQu »

strbean wrote: post #40
kixiQu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect, but it's principally incorrect because we all abuse the artist field to contain composer information. This is done, I surmise, because figuring out when to display the composer information (performances of composed works) and when not to (bands) is too hard while delivering consistent UX.

It could be as simple as another piece of metadata on the track.

And on the file level, it is! But then do you as a music player / streaming service display that all the time, when most people are not listening to classical music and do not care about the composer? Do you make the user manage which columns are visible? (Almost every HN user misses when more software did this. Almost every normal user found it confusing/annoying.) What about publishers who do not give a damn that Johann Sebastian Bach did not perform this digital recording because they know it'll SEO way better to have him in the artist field? Now are you displaying all that inconsistency?

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#62

Post by _carbyau_ »

caseyross wrote: post #20

With the success of AI content generation for text (GPT-3 etc.) and images (DALL-E etc.), it seems inevitable that music will soon be targeted as well, if not already. What's particularly interesting in the music sphere is that there are already well-established trends towards building a sort of ambient, atmospheric, generated soundscape. (For example, the famous "Lo-Fi girl" stream.) AI-generated content is a very n…

Generated music but with dance troupes? Ala K-Pop?

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#63

Post by 20after4 »

dashwehacct wrote: post #53
w_for_wumbo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I listened to the playlist too and it's definitely the same song with small variations. Imagine finding dozens of threads where comments are all the same, but with very slight changes of words used in each comment.

I listened to that playlist as well and it is nearly the same song with slight variations. Imagine finding dozens of threads where comments are all the same, but with very small changes of phrasing used in each comment.

I listened to that comment thread as well and it is very similar to the playlist, only with slight variations. Imagine finding hundreds of threads where the colors are all the same, but with very small changes in the pattern as they are all woven into a blanket.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#64

Post by tekstar »

j-bos wrote: post #2

The post was interesting, but I also noticed something in the blog that had the same flavor. Even though the link was for a specific post, the page layout neatly flowed into another post. So smooth I thought the second post's title was a subheading of the original article. A strange thing, but maybe that's just me making connections that aren't there.

Robin sends out a weekly(?) newsletter with a variety of topics.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#65

Post by matchagaucho »

Interesting that this Ghost Producer chose a polyrhythmic tuples over 4 meter. That's very difficult for the average listener to "find the one" downbeat.

Wonder what the thought process was behind this. Less likely to skip the track while trying to find the groove? More monetization with the short length?

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2IaWgbhpPbS3Z9DYgf1rqg?si=...

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#66

Post by hedora »

usednet wrote: post #28

People have been noticing this a lot recently but what nobody seems to know is that this is a form of money laundering/“scamming.” I know because I used to be active on crime forums and talked to some of the people who engineered this scheme. People will set up fake Spotify artist accounts with stolen identities and bank accounts, pay a musician for songs that pass as music, and then bot millions of streams on them.…

Interestingly, searching for Danni Richardson on Tidal yields the following apparently real artists:

Deanie Richardson

Danny Richardson

Dani Richardson

So, they are typo-squatting as part of the scheme.

I asssume money laundering would work by setting up Spotify accounts with stolen money (that they used to buy gift cards?), then streaming the fake songs.

Does spotify pay artists differently for paid vs free accounts? If not, then presumably they use free accounts for the bots, so it isn't really money laundering.

I guess if you get some streams from real people, then using paid bot accounts might still be a reasonably cash efficient form of money laundering.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#67

Post by peddling-brink »

nerdponx wrote: post #54
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How on earth can Spotify distinguish real Fanny from fake Fanny? I can't tell if the post is serious or just a setup now.

To be fair, Spotify often conflates lesser-known artists that have the same name, particularly if they both inhabit some kind of "alt" genre, even if the two genres are totally different alt genres. Are they two different artists, or did they just change their sound? Sometimes it's obvious (e.g. techno DJ and death metal band with same name), but sometimes it's not even easy for a human to decide (two unrelated indie…

The person you replied to was suggesting that the previous post was a setup to be able to use that last line. Fanny is a slang term.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#69

Post by eduction »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #26
dangrossman wrote: post #6

> A single kitchen operating under many names to increase its algorithmic “surface area”; another shape of things to come. I find this infuriating. There's one dominican restaurant in my city that's listed on DoorDash, Grubhub and UberEats under over 20 different names with different subsets of their menu. All of these duplicate listings for the same place make it harder to search or browse the actual restaurant opti…

(Shrug) This is how hotel restaurants, including some very good ones, have always worked. What difference does it make what other ethnicities/varieties of food the restaurant delivers?

This is a really interesting comparison! And good context. Is the hotel operating multiple restaurants from one kitchen really different (as some comments here seem to imply) because each has its own physical space? In a way that’s more “skin in the game” for a hotel vs a ghost kitchen proliferating brands bounded only by their ability to cook the food. On the other hand, that’s a pretty significant bound.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#70

Post by usefulcat »

caseyross wrote: post #20

With the success of AI content generation for text (GPT-3 etc.) and images (DALL-E etc.), it seems inevitable that music will soon be targeted as well, if not already. What's particularly interesting in the music sphere is that there are already well-established trends towards building a sort of ambient, atmospheric, generated soundscape. (For example, the famous "Lo-Fi girl" stream.) AI-generated content is a very n…

Generated music has been around for at least several years, for example https://generative.fm/ (no affiliation).
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