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An odd discovery on Spotify

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Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#281

Post by ZiiS »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #229
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.

Seems to be an unsolved problem to train the algorithms for recognizing different situations. One recommendation for all roles the user has. Though, thinking about, it's probably unsolvable as long as the interfaces remain simple and focused on satisfying only the one user, not the different roles, which would complicated the interfaces.

I think this is fairly well solved from a mathematics point of view (high-school level k-means clustering). The unsolved bit is simply how we get the Spotify et al. product managers to care.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#282

Post by lupire »

winternett wrote: post #112
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.…

I think I came across a YouTube video a while back that said even the platform was sponsoring fake artist accounts to recoup/claim streaming royalty payments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCAPll9A5F8 After years of grinding to break ground on spotify and seeing the names they promote taking the lion share of revenue it becomes very apparent that it's a cash grab that just can't be trusted. There are literally doze…

You shouldn't expect to profit if your product is completely substitutable with another 0 cost product (generic background music)

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#283

Post by txtsd »

dominotw wrote: post #280
pelario wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify is missing user profiles, in the Netflix fashion.

spotify is usually on people's personal device like a phone not on communal device at home like a TV.

Speak for yourself. I use Spotify on my TV at home. Multiple people use it.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#284

Post by Danborg »

Look at the Peaceful Guitar editorial playlist on Spotify. (It’s one of the biggest and most streamed in the world.) Every artist on there that doesn’t have a Bio is a fake artist. Meaning Spotify owns the music. They populate their playlists with these artists they own and that way don’t have to make royalty payments to them. It’s very shady.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#285

Post by thehappypm »

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.…

I don’t doubt that people are using Spotify to launder money, but I really don’t think this is particular method is a viable approach. It would be a much better business model if you could buy off iTunes or something, where are you know that most of the money is actually going to the recipient.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#286

Post by astura »

jiggawatts wrote: post #200
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…

Something I noticed after I watched an episode of Stoic Finance[1] about a possible "impending crash of the Chinese economy" is that YouTube started recommending about a dozen "independent" channels. I put the word independent in air quotes because they all have near-identical looking title cards with the similar fonts, some variant of the phrasing "The collapse has begun!", and the same-ish content. Different presen…

>You've got to wonder if there's someone with deep pockets trying to influence public opinion on China? Or is it just the same thing as the "local" news channels, where a bunch of YouTubers have been "bought" by a corporation that send them material to read?

These are the least likely options.

The most likely case is that the channels are all copying each other. Even if they were all put out by a couple content farms, it's extremely unlikely that the content farms care about anything else but making money. The only thing they likely care about is that people watch videos like those.

People trying to make easy money is, by far, more common on YouTube.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#287

Post by dotancohen »

midasz wrote: post #160
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…

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.

  > Row row row your boat doesn't mix well with Anthrax
I'm not so sure about that. Have you heard Koяn's Shoots and Ladders?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU2k-U2Ze0o

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#288

Post by roywashere »

hakanensari wrote: post #232
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.

Don't these end up in separate mixes, though? My 13 year old makes a lot of grime requests on road trips etc. and now I have a separate grime mix under my top mixes.

My brother who has young kids did the thing where you can make a combined playlist with me. He has indeed kids music littered all over in the shared playlist but moreover he also listened to a 100 track audio book on Spotify (which was not a great experience since it was published as an album and did not have bookmark support). The algorithm thought: oh he must REALLY like that album because he keeps on playing tracks from it, and so chapters from this book were also in our combined playlist

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#289

Post by dotancohen »

dominotw wrote: post #280
pelario wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify is missing user profiles, in the Netflix fashion.

spotify is usually on people's personal device like a phone not on communal device at home like a TV.

It should be noted that in a Tesla, changing the Driver Profile (stores settings like seat and mirror positions) also changes the logged in Spotify account.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#290

Post by eadmund »

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.…

I wonder how much of the traditional music and theatre businesses has been money laundering. One could put out a record (which presumably has a nice margin on it) and pay folks a small amount of money to buy many many many copies of the records with cash, turning the dirty funds into clean ones. Likewise with a theatre production and ticket sales. Seems like any business with significant cash inputs would be vulnerable to this.

And of course it would make it very difficult for legitimate businesses to survive: they would lack the implicit subsidy that the illegitimate businesses get.

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