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An odd discovery on Spotify

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Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#201

Post by cuteboy19 »

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?

Like an airgap for money

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#202

Post by vintermann »

entropy_ wrote: post #169
Jolter wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was about to say something similar. I don't even work at a streaming service, but I know label-provided metadata is enough of a steaming pile that there are third party start-ups which promise to help with the problem and such.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#203

Post by VBprogrammer »

null_object wrote: post #186
merijnv wrote: post #146

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…

> 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. I've had the opposite experience with Spotify - I'd say my discovery of new music has withered to almost nil since switching when Google Music shifted to YouTube. The algorithm just churns stuff I've already listened to, or…

> Spotify's own fake artists - session musicians generated to capture royalties in-house.

Is this something you have any references for? It sounds super interesting, like shadow kitchens for music.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#204

Post by vintermann »

strbean wrote: post #40
kixiQu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect, but it's principally incorrect because we all abuse the artist field to contain composer information. This is done, I surmise, because figuring out when to display the composer information (performances of composed works) and when not to (bands) is too hard while delivering consistent UX.

It could be as simple as another piece of metadata on the track.

That would be work for the label. Most of them won't DO the w word.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#205

Post by vishnugupta »

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.…

This happens in almost every company that acts as intermediary between buyers and sellers, I.e., a marketplace.

Uber had (still has?) similar challenge where fake drivers were created, who took fake rides to liquidate stolen credit cards.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#206

Post by VBprogrammer »

WithinReason wrote: post #198
midasz wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can turn off monitoring what you listen to for recommendations by launching a "Private session" in the app

That's a good tip though I'm not sure that there is an option for it in the car when I most often get a request for nursery rhymes, or more recently Disney songs.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#207

Post by vintermann »

indymike wrote: post #47
Barrin92 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously wonder why this isn't taken down. Should be pretty trivial given overlap of physical or payment addresses if they're registering the same restaurant several times on the same platform. Probably even possible to do it by hand.

If it generates revenue, it's not going down. There is absolutely no incentive at all to remove it. In fact, it gives the consumer more choices, and more ways to give money to the gig delivery service, and acts as a bulwark against being bullied by chains.

The equivalent on Spotify are not generating revenue, though. The existence of these algorithmically generated spam artists doesn't factor into anyone's decision to buy premium or not - at least not in a positive way. And still they're there.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#208

Post by amelius »

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.…

Doesn't it leave a money trail?

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#209

Post by xvello »

bpye wrote: post #153
LelouBil wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Websites that scrape StackOverflow are the WORST! It's always giving me false hopes that my problem got resolved until I notice that I've alrezdy read the question before.

There's one site that scrapes GitHub as well - it does at least have a link to the original page, but I've only ever opened it by mistake...

There is a community-maintained list of these stackoverflow / github / npm / wikipedia clones, and adblocking rules to hide them from search results: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

These lists are supported as presets in https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#210

Post by dento »

rightbyte wrote: post #190
merijnv wrote: post #146

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…

Spotify's algorithm works really well until you let someone else use the account. I wish there was a "child mode", "party mode" or whatever to disable updating recommendations.

There is. Called "private session" in the settings.
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