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An odd discovery on Spotify

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Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#81

Post by INTPenis »

jeremyjh wrote: post #80
kingofpandora wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm probably missing something but how is this money laundering?

It costs money to run the streams but Spotify pays some of that back out to the "artists"; that money sounds plausibly pretty clean. Until there was a thread at the top of HN about it and everyone suddenly knew how it worked. Of course GP might just be a GPT3 experiment...

What does it cost an artist to run a stream? I thought Spotify hosted the content. Do you mean it costs money to run the bots that listen to the stream and get the artist recommended and heard by more people?

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#82

Post by remuskaos »

Ooh, I think I found something like that too , a few years ago. I searched for a song (a real one, that I already knew) called "Dyson Sphere". That search still yields a few hits.

One of those was by an artist called Adal, and while it wasn't what I was looking for at all, I still listened to it. It was slow, rythmic and very simple music (think "human music"). When I looked for other works of this Adal, they had maybe like 8 songs, all of them the same simple melody but slightly different speed, rhythm and so on. At first I thought I was listening to that same song, but there definitely were slight differences.

At the time I didn't understand why anyone would produce such a thing, but in this context it makes much more sense.

I just searched again for Adal - Dyson Sphere, but there seem to be no hits. I wonder if the artist has since been deleted.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#83

Post by jan_pike »

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.…

That...Makes a lot of sense, now that I think about it. I guess it wasn't really apparent to me before it came to my attention like this, but making online content and artificially boosting it, so you can blend your funds within what you've obtained from ad revenue is so simple, yet so brilliant.

Makes you wonder what other media out there might be laundering schemes, too...

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#85

Post by andrewmcwatters »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #76

This is so fascinating! And... somehow shiver-inducing creepy: https://open.spotify.com/track/680Xyj7IgbBioIZ8BylEkJ?si=572... 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…

OK, so if you want to force the recommendation system to generate similar music, of course you can use the "Go to song radio" feature on Spotify.

Here are some other interesting seeds.

* 0:47 seed (Romilda Prime): https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E8NyZRPJ6i5rq?si=...

* Venera Fanucci seed: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E8PTURLXiSzw3?si=...

* Scars Hayden seed: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E8NLdq3OfZZrl?si=...

* Chinpe seed: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E8O73Ntg828PD?si=...

This one is interesting because even the album art is generated, rather than stock. The artist names are usually all uppercase. Perhaps a different author, but the techniques seem the same.

* Western Wilds seed: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E8LLKjmBVSRwb?si=...

(See also Exboro Key, Defiant Leather, Gallisle Isle...)

* Hollow Linen seed: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E8PeWgO6Bpowe?si=...

* Surrane Path seed: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E8NCJ0IQOCfKi?si=...

This is a broken classical music generator, perhaps the most interesting!

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#86

Post by mathattack »

CincinnatiMan wrote: post #37
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.…

Is the idea that you spend dirty money on the bots in order to earn clean money on the fake artist accounts?

And it’s cheaper.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#87

Post by mkl95 »

ford wrote: post #23

This feels like the Spotify version of the websites you find on Google that just scrape Stack Overflow As Spotify's recommendations become more ingrained in how people listen to music they'll have to think about how to treat "song spam"

Song spam does not seem to be endemic yet, but there are tons of low quality covers. Many classic rock songs have a couple of decent covers and half a dozen abysmal ones.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#88

Post by williamscales »

vosper wrote: post #49
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.…

Is it money laundering in that "dirty" money pays for the bots that rack up the streams, which generates "clean" money paid from Spotify to the fake artist?

Yep, exactly

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#89

Post by Rodeoclash »

This has been going on for quite a while, since 2013 at least.

Rdio used to have a top played section which for a while got dominated by some very very weird albums. This was one of them:

https://open.spotify.com/track/0e3DihEy2kupmSSpzqfqNP

The story behind how it got to the top is outlined here:

https://musicfeeds.com.au/news/melbourne-programmer-hacks-hi...

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#90

Post by ciropantera »

derbOac wrote: post #19
nullhack wrote: post #5

Sybil attack on Spotify! Since both Spotify and Grubhub have a digital layer, actors can multiply endlessly! Is the only solution to retreat to campfire songs and home cooking?

The next step in this, of course, is Spotify just generating music on the fly algorithmically based on your choices. Skip the middleman, so to speak. Maybe it is Spotify behind it?

I heard a similar story a couple of years ago: some no-name artist with a fairly good amount of plays on Spotify who could not be found anywhere else online. It was less obviously ai-generated back then (more instrumental than vibe/ambient), so it was speculated that it could be a musician working on commission for Spotify, who was then stuffing their playlists with these songs to cut costs. I can't find any traces of this story anymore though.
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