71–80 of 442 posts
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.…
Related: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/an-mbw-reader-just-bl...
Uggh. I wish payola were actually illegal in practice.
> So who’s really losing in this equation?
Possibly, older out of touch-artists who think music should always be something meaningful and “culturally important” and are perhaps – just slightly – butthurt that no one cares, or that other people have figured out another way to be successful.
I can't tell if this bit is dripping with sarcasm, or if the author is actually this contemptuous of musicians and this dismissive of the difficulty associated with getting "discovered" these days.
Either way, it is a fascinating article. Wouldn't have guessed that Sony was one of the leading spammers/fraudsters (see other threads on this article) in this space, or that Spotify was complicit.
This actually makes me angrier than the Sony rootkit fiasco.
Thanks for the link.
> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is almost certainly generated as well, found through a recommendation series from the article.
It's so creepy because it feels like something that isn't made by a human, like composition uncanny valley!
Edit: As a side note, you should be careful to not like the music in this article. I suspect it will poison your Discover Weekly and other algorithmically generated playlists as they seem to be based on other listeners' data.
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…
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).
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jul/11/david-cop...
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.
I listened to the playlist and it's definitely the same song over and over again with slight tweaks. Imagine finding dozens of blogs where posts are all the same, but with very slight changes to vocabulary used in each blog.
What's fascinating about natural language models for me, is that I assume it is already being applied to "spin" articles, and I imagine that is part of why Google kinda sucks to use right now.
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.…
I'm probably missing something but how is this money laundering?
Of course GP might just be a GPT3 experiment...