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An odd discovery on Spotify

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Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#251

Post by Cthulhu_ »

alkonaut wrote: post #151

This is the TikTok-ification of music. The required response is the same here, as it is to the consumption of any other media, which is the same as when ordering food. Don't order food out of a random dark kitchen. Order from a brick and mortar restaurant you know . Don't use algorithmic feeds to discover video. Find a channel/producer you like and watch that. The same applies to music. Assume everything fed to you i…

I mean I will use the algorithmic lists to discover new music - with limited success in recent years, I might add - and the autoplaying 'radio' after an album helps to keep me in a flow, but I usually start with a specific band / album or playlist.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#253

Post by nkozyra »

merijnv wrote: post #146
nosianu wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 hear this all the time but Spotify just plays stuff I've listened to. It's not a discovery service for me, it just plays the hits.

I'm wondering if that's just what it is and everyone likes it because it's playing stuff they already like for twelve tracks and then one new song.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#254

Post by richrichardsson »

cimus wrote: post #191
dcow wrote: post #118

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...

I listened to Romilda Gebbia if that was what you were refering to, and to me it sounds like I V vi IV.

iirc those are the same "4 chords" used by the Axis of Awesome [1]. Certainly sounded like that to my ear from memory, but don't really have enough music notation/theory knowledge to know for certain and I may have been mis-remembering.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#255

Post by beowulfey »

INTPenis wrote: post #81
jeremyjh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs money to run the streams but Spotify pays some of that back out to the "artists"; that money sounds plausibly pretty clean. Until there was a thread at the top of HN about it and everyone suddenly knew how it worked. Of course GP might just be a GPT3 experiment...

What does it cost an artist to run a stream? I thought Spotify hosted the content. Do you mean it costs money to run the bots that listen to the stream and get the artist recommended and heard by more people?

You need some kind of publisher/label to get on Spotify; an individual can’t do it themselves (unless that’s changed recently). There are labels that do this for a reasonable amount of money, Like $30-50/year or so.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#256

Post by mekkkkkk »

thematrixturtle wrote: post #57
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 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…

What you are saying is that the "artist" whose account the cleaned money goes to has to be in on it? I.e. no identity theft or bank account hijacking?

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#258

Post by hutzlibu »

midasz wrote: post #243
adamauckland wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't really complain if they offer Spotify Family which gives you 6 separate premium accounts, I think it's only double the cost of a normal Spotify account.

So the solution is paying double so I can log out of my own account and into an account I created for my 2 year old so we can listen to a disney song? And when I want to listen to my own songs again then I have to log out of my kids account and back into my own?

Always those complaining customers ...

(and I am back to caring for my own mp3 collection again and use spotify only for rare and new stuff)

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#259

Post by bryanrasmussen »

coldtea wrote: post #174
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A bigger problem would be that Spotify pays very little. And to have the bot "listen" to a song (to be eligible for payment) takes minutes of streaming, which turns to tons of time and a big bandwidth bill, since they'll need to do thousands of them in parallel...

it's obviously worthwhile for them now to do this, but sure it is an additional cost that at some point will make it not worth doing.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#260

Post by chillchilla »

huffmsa wrote: post #212
chewz wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Spotify and Apple Music algos have no idea about music mood vs time of the day vs activity. Like late evening before sleep being perhaps not a good moment for heavy metal. And running not a right time for slow classical music. Which is weird in case of Apple Music because Apple knows exactly if I am sleeping, running or driving a car - just from reading my watch.

What that really means is that they either: 1) aren't doing the sensor fusion we all think they are, out of inability to access the data. 2) the models (and therefore modelers) aren't good enough to use the data they have correctly.

Or 3) they run loads of A/B experiments to optimize engagement or some target metric and they've reached a local minima and are unable to escape it without a lot of political will or Product Managers willing to stick their necks out.
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