171–180 of 442 posts
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.
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 almost makes sense, except that the money is paid out to the artist, so if you're using a stolen bank account, it remains 'dirty' after the round-trip. What you'd want to do is use the dirty money for the bots that drive up the revenue, and the clean account for the artist to collect the royalties. This way the artist has plausible deniability, and if the bank account paying for the bots gets busted, it doesn't…
Back in the days, it was done with SMS payments and "party lines" with per-minute payments.
The songs in the playlist are the first 4 chords of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachelbel's_Canon essentially looped for 47 seconds. I V vi iii appears very frequently in pop music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I . If one were trying to exploit the algorithm...
E.g. in they key of C I (C E G), iii (E G B), vi (A C E). iii can be seen as Imaj7 without the root (C) and vi as Iadd6 without the 5th (G).
So basically this is I-V-I-I with some decoration, being V-I the quintessential movement in western classical music.
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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?
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> 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 real…
As a father of a young child, Spotify's algo's are completely useless to me. If their ML is so smart it should be able to determine that Row row row your boat doesn't mix well with Anthrax. Wish I'd be able to toggle 'don't recommend kids music' somewhere.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 real…
As a father of a young child, Spotify's algo's are completely useless to me. If their ML is so smart it should be able to determine that Row row row your boat doesn't mix well with Anthrax. Wish I'd be able to toggle 'don't recommend kids music' somewhere.
I did consider creating another "gym-only" user on our Family plan, but Spotify should really have a way to create named contexts for the one user. e.g. commute, gym, run, working from home, on a plane, etc.
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.
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
Anywhoo I was surprised to find close to 20 Youtube accounts that only has like stitched-together 1 hour videos of all her content. With non a none negligible view count.
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…