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An odd discovery on Spotify

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Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#141

Post by zebracanevra »

wohfab wrote: post #123
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

Oh yes, there are many of those. Here's another example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=219t6qwOWYk

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#142

Post by ogrisel »

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.…

There is a similar problem with the YouTube recsys on cheaply generated videos (e.g. a physics + 3d rendering model to generate colorful videos of Spiderman and Batman driving colliding cars).

See this older piece by Natasha Lomas on Tech Crunch:

I watched 1,000 hours of YouTube Kids’ content and this is what happened… http://tcrn.ch/2iPXpIA

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#143

Post by vintermann »

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"

Oh, they have been aware of it for a long time.

https://blog.echonest.com/post/48943428838/how-we-cope-with-...

Spotify is actually half-decent here. The other streaming services seem to mainly compete on cutting costs, and many are little more than frontends over 7digital's services (who, surprise, also do virtually nothing to prevent spam).

To take an example:

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

That particular spammer has been doing this thing for years. He's easily recognizable: one characteristic is the way he uses colour filters. If you search qobuz (one of these terrible front-end streaming services which does no QQ) for the label "piano to go", and say, the album "Joker Games", you'll notice it's uploaded once for Bill Haley, and once for Bill Haley & his Comets. That was apparently close enough to be detected as a duplicate, so he put a blue image filter on the latter.

Most of this guy's albums eventually get deleted (or delisted), even on sites like Qobuz - probably more for lack of plays than for being detected as spam, I'd bet. So you don't get his full history. But I found out the French library service made some effort to catalogue streaming releases a while back, and with access to search in those, you can track his evolution. He was a lot sloppier in the past, for instance he didn't bother to come up with a new label name for every dump. But he's been at it since at least 2015.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#144

Post by bryanrasmussen »

williamscales wrote: post #88
vosper wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

ok so the problem for the money launderer is that as spotify gets better at detecting bots and spam accounts they will have to pay increasing amounts of dirty money to get out clean money, at what point does it become a losing proposition to them, that is to say when this form of money laundering is less efficient than older forms?

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#145

Post by someweirdperson »

mgdlbp wrote: post #75
20after4 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I listened to the users also and it's nearly the same comment with minor variations. Imagine finding dozens of threads where the jokes are all the same, but with very unsubstantive changes in phrasing as the site is turning into Reddit.

> I listened to the users ...

No way! No one ever listens to the users.

There's some obvious random word shuffling happening and that gave it away.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#146

Post by merijnv »

nosianu wrote: post #131
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's really interesting - although when I read that story I thought the point was the broken recommendation system. Happens to me a lot on Youtube too - you watch just one thing - and now your recommendations are full of things like that one thing . Or Facebook/Youtube, somehow: I watched a single video on Youtube about Viking sword fighting and suddenly my people recommendations on Facebook were at least 20% milit…

> Happens to me a lot on Youtube too - you watch just one thing - and now your recommendations are full of things like that one thing.

Spotify's recommendation system is much better than youtube's (at least for me). I frequently "joke" that it is one of the few applications of ML that actively make my life as a consumer better.

Having been following Spotify's "Discover Weekly" for several years now, I'm actually really impressed how it manages to blend my long-term taste with recent moods. If I've been listening to one type of music for 1 or 2 weeks, there will be a noticeable uptick of it in the recommendations, while still mixing in less recent tastes.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#147

Post by maxehmookau »

How fascinating. I guess this opens the old question "What is music?"

This is all definitely generated algorithmically using a really common chord progression in western music. (Think Pachebel's canon).

So a person (or group of people?) is creating generatively created music that is designed to be as pleasing to the ear of a human so that Spotify ranks it higher in automatically generated playlists which means more plays, which means more money.

It's crappy and spammy but also really kinda clever.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#148

Post by yesbabyyes »

dustinmoris wrote: post #122
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?

Not necessarily. Let's say you get a burner phone and hook it up at home. You need internet and electricity of course.

Buy a Spotify gift card for $10 USD cash, use that to get Spotify Premium (first use the three months free of course).

Play your (artists') songs, 30 seconds each (considered one stream by Spotify). That's 2880 streams per hour, 86400 streams per month.

Spotify pays around $2-$4 USD per 1000 streams, so that's ~170-340 USD clean money coming in. Some of that goes to Amuse/TuneCore/etc. Then music production, admin, etc. But there seems to be quite some money to be made, especially once you manage to fake your way into recommendations and get legit streams as well.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#149

Post by IAmNotAFix »

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?

What is the money efficiency of that?

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#150

Post by djmips »

objclxt wrote: post #116
netsharc wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a shitton of crap movies in Hollywood. I wonder... Of course Hollywood accounting is already "This movie took $100 million at the box office, we spent $98 million on 'marketing', using our own internal marketing company.". I guess making crap Hollywood movies loses you money rather than laundering it...

> There is a shitton of crap movies in Hollywood. I wonder... The movie doesn't need to be crap to be a product of money laundering! The Wolf of Wall Street[1] was infamously funded by money laundering (from the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund), [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wolf_of_Wall_Street_(2013_...

Wow that's a rabbit hole!

https://www.theedgemarkets.com/article/prosecution-tells-jur...

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