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An odd discovery on Spotify

robinsloan.com

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Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#121

Post by vintermann »

vintermann wrote: post #102
hedora wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't assume they're just targeting Spotify. Spotify is (or used to be) the best at catching algorithmic spam, the other streaming services hardly care at all. Likely they use a front service such as TuneCore which gives them access to all the streaming services. Just using Spotify is unnecessary risky if the goal is simply money laundering. (However, if the goal is to do pick up some royalties from all those backgro…

The spammer is still at it, I see:

https://www.deezer.com/search/%22From%20the%20box%22/album

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#122

Post by dustinmoris »

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.…

How is this money laundering? If you use dirty money to sign up to Spotify and listen to specific songs so that you get some of the money “clean” back wouldn’t that in case of Spotify be the dumbest and most inefficient way of laundering in the history of money laundering? I mean doesn’t Spotify keep the majority so you’re essentially donating dirty money into the stock price of Spotify for the most part, no?

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#123

Post by wohfab »

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"

I recently discovered YouTube videos that use a crappy spoken intro with a real human face in it and then proceed to display scraped StackOverflow answers as text with music in the background. the intro/outro is always the same as it is very generic.

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HElG3iLn6Kk

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#124

Post by HailTheGreenOne »

Rodeoclash wrote: post #89

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...

"hacking script" xD my sides

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#125

Post by ciropantera »

johnorourke wrote: post #98
ciropantera wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

This story perhaps: https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/fake-artists-have-...

Exactly, thanks

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#126

Post by slac »

dannyobrien wrote: post #111
user_named wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The criminal gångs in Sweden are using Spotify to launder drug money buy buying streams on artists in their circle who they also to some extent control. One of those were just murdered last year.

do you have a link or source for this story? (not sceptical, just curious)

Here is an article in the Swedish equivalent of the financial Times. https://www.di.se/digital/expert-streamingtjanster-anvands-f...

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#127

Post by akshayshah »

Only loosely related, but Robin Sloan also wrote a truly excellent article about using neural nets to produce music: https://www.mcdbooks.com/features/sourdough

In his book Sourdough, he spends quite a while describing the music of the Mazg - a fictional group of European migrants. For the audiobook version of Sourdough, he trains a SampleRNN model on a particular genre of Croatian music, then has the model produce Mazg music. The description of machine learning is vivid and approachable, and the audio clips are fantastic.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#128

Post by feydaykyn »

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…

That's the plot of Norman Spinrad's book Little heroes. It starts with the idea that Music record companies can only make bad automated music, and in order to make a hit, they hire real musicians.

It's a great read! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/719900.Little_Heroes?ref...

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#129

Post by vintermann »

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #35
DecoPerson wrote: post #7

In the “Release Radar” generated for me last week, there was a 40 second song consisting of rhythmic mechanical noises with a strange title and album art of an alien head. I didn’t like it at all. I think it was recommended to me because the publisher listed its artist as “Fanny Mendelssohn” — a classical composer whose work I definitely enjoy and have probably pressed “Like” a few times on — even though the song had…

> 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.

Probably serious enough, since the album they describe exists. Spotify is smart enough to know that it isn't "the" Fanny Mendelssohn though - at least in the artist database. It could well be that Release Radar is dumber and is fooled by the matching name.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#130

Post by ggm »

seibelj wrote: post #119
ggm wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes. but the cost side matters: if a criminal has $1,000,000 but can only recover $1,000 "safely" burning $999,000 then a method which returns $500,000 for burn of $500,000 is better, if riskier. "it depends"

I worked in an office next to an Uber clone that was clearly unsuccessful. Yet they had a significant Series A from a Russian oligarch, then got bought a few years later at something like 10x the Series A funding amount by a different Russian oligarch. There was a press release and a news story about how wonderful this was. This scheme was so clearly a laundering play, but everyone pretended it was some amazing exit.…

If they can offload on the market, this might be net lossless or lower loss at scale than other methods.

I guess taking net company worth into a bank in Cyprus or something and using it as security to buy land, boats, whatever achieves the real outcome. Even if only some 1/nth can be collateralised

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