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An odd discovery on Spotify

robinsloan.com

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Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#161
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…

It reminds me of stealing a cool car in GTA and then every car you see is that same model.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#163
I think about these kind of activities and their motivations a lot.

Money is too valuable and rewarding that many people will constantly chase these hustle practices no matter the ethical implications or if they are shady. Even more so if they are legal.

With the current potential of AI and automation this just makes the resulting impact bigger for the 'good citizen consumer', like the sheet amount of autogenerated videos on YouTube that just read out loud some scrapped content, or even the stolen and reposted content, all in seek of finding a semiautomatic money cow that they can milk. After all, if that can give you easy scalable money, why not trying?

The bad part is that now consumers have to deal with a polluted search result and recommendations list, that is really hard to filter by the media owners because its a tough issue.

I understand the motivations, but I hate that the product degrades the quality as a result of a few actors .

Sometimes I wonder if this will always be the status quo in our world and I'm actually missing out on joining these practices as well and see if I can hit some jackpot, but I hate these side hustle practices.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#165
As a producer, I feel like this could be more related to people using Splice and other popular sample packs in order to just get something uploaded onto Spotify? I've come across a lot of very similar tracks on Spotify which utilise all the same sounds from the same sample packs and they're almost identical.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#166

> 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…

I don't mind it myself. If you like the food it's OK if a downtown bar and grill is also sidelining as a chicken restaurant online. They have slow times and a paid kitchen staff. Go for it!

And some of the other ghost kitchens / home address food prep is pretty good. Like there was an ice cream place that delivered until midnight ( out of somebodies garage ) their ice cream was cooled down to well below zero so it was not melted when you got it.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#167
The author seems to be suprised by this, not just founding it on Spotify, but the whole process. E.g.:

"I love it, because it’s so strange, so dizzying, and — credit where due–because our mystery producer is truly going with the grain of the medium, in a way that no one merely “making albums” does, at all. What could be more 21st century, more “liquid modernity”, than releasing your music as a haze of variations into the swirling currents of the algorithm?"

But tons of artists have done the same in the past, whether in streaming platforms or in the vinyl and CD era. The most famous is probably Brian Eno who has made several albums using algorithmic generation.

In general, algorithmic composition is a sizable niche, both in academy (tons of music PhDs on that), live performance, and recording settings. And yes, people release those things too.

Even "generated content" to make bucks is a well known thing, both in music platforms like Spotify, in Amazon (tons of auto-generated Kindle books), and in YouTube (https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...).

The strange thing is, the author should already have known all this, as his previous post goes:

"My band The Cotton Modules, formed with the composer Jesse Solomon Clark, also goes with the grain of the 21st century: our process combines AI tools with human skill and imagination, metabolizing a huge archive of recorded music into something genuinely new and exciting."

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#168
The same "discovery" happened to me half a year ago. Suddenly my queue contained just awful music at some point and I have googled the artists and found nothing. I decided to ditch Spotify altogether, because not only was I paying premium for this shit, but also it seems that Spotify doesn't really have the situation under control: https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/spotify-bot-takedowns-...

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#169
post #139

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…

They should (and probably do, behind the scenes) have separate data fields for composer and performer. At least, I believe that labels will input those separately for each track, to enable correct tracking of compensation. Then Spotify will lump them together into “artist” n the UI, I assume. To make it easier for a casual user to find what they want. The “performer” Fanny Mendelssohn should probably not be confused…

I like how you think labels correctly label anything. I happen to work at a music streaming service (not Spotify) and I can definitely say that those datasets are insanely noisy and generally you can't really trust labels to, well, label their data correctly for anything.
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