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An odd discovery on Spotify

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Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#371

Post by vinay_ys »

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.…

The scam part here is that listen traffic is bot-generated? Irrespective of that, on the payout side, why do you need stolen identities? It is Spotify paying out legitimately, isn't it?

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#372

Post by dylan604 »

eadmund wrote: post #290
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 vulnerab…

By theater, what type of theater are you meaning? Stage performances like plays? If you put on a crap play, the critics will lambast it for the sham it is, and then no more ticket sales.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#373

Post by philsnow »

folkrav wrote: post #359
wldcordeiro wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Youtube algorithm bothers me a lot because they have the subscribe system but as soon as you do subscribe to a channel that channel basically disappears off the recommendations/front page.

I literally ignore the front page 99% of the time and just go to https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

This is also the only way I can make sense of twitter, skip the 'feed' or whatever it's called[0] and go right to my curated lists.

[0] as an aside, I only just made the connection that 'feed' is likely an abbreviation of 'newsfeed' but also brings a strong and stark connotation that I'm livestock to be fed

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#374

Post by eteos »

caseyross wrote: post #20

With the success of AI content generation for text (GPT-3 etc.) and images (DALL-E etc.), it seems inevitable that music will soon be targeted as well, if not already. What's particularly interesting in the music sphere is that there are already well-established trends towards building a sort of ambient, atmospheric, generated soundscape. (For example, the famous "Lo-Fi girl" stream.) AI-generated content is a very n…

I think music, especially pop music, is in a completely different ball park than text or images. An AI can't just make a catchy song only with a training model and some rules. Successful musicians have a feel for what we will like and what will be trendy. An AI can't do that, at least not for a while to come. Well, thats just my thoughts, I'm not an expert on this.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#375

Post by josephcsible »

toxicFork wrote: post #134
josephcsible wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it really easy to avoid all these fake restaurants, since the fakes only appear when you're searching for takeout? Just pretend you want to dine in, find a restaurant that you want that way, then pull it up in your takeout app of choice.

That's not really easy. That's a lot of work.

How is that a lot of work? Is it a lot of work if you really are looking for a restaurant where you can dine in?

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#376

Post by pessimizer »

lizardactivist wrote: post #236
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.…

How do the scammers get the money if they use someone else's (stolen) identity and bank account? Also, how do they succeed in keeping this scheme for more than a few days after the identity theft is noticed and reported to the police? And why would they not just take the very music they just bought and paid for, and publish that as any other artist do? There's no crime in buying the rights from another artist -- that…

> Also, how do they succeed in keeping this scheme for more than a few days after the identity theft is noticed and reported to the police?

Why would a stolen identity not being used to steal from the person whose identity was stolen, but just to process legal payments, be noticed in a few days? Or even a few years? Maybe at some point the IRS might find the account that used my identity and send me an angry letter, but that seems like it would be years down the line.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#377

Post by levoea »

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…

I turned off youtube recommendations years ago so I can't comment on that, but spotify's have pretty much always been terrible in my experience.

Anything suggested on the front page is either songs i already have in my liked songs or completely out of place. And the songs that i've already liked are from a few specific genres and artists, which seem completely random.

A few examples:

* Ratatat and Röyksopp both are in my top 5 of all time according to Spotify's own stats, yet I never got any suggestion about E.VAX, Kunzite, or Röyksopp's releases (their Lost Tapes playlist and their latest album, released about 4 months ago).

* the 'recommended for today' section is regularly filled with random synthwave when it's a genre i barely ever listen to, and a lot of 'electronica/trance/organica/deep house/whatever you want to call it', which i don't really listen to either (at least this kind of electro music).

* still, the worst offender has to be podcasts. I have zero interest in podcasts, have never clicked on any and likely never will, yet it's always the first thing on the app homepage, just below 'recently played'.

I've tried to use the browsing categories but these are most of the time just as poor, they only contain a few playlists and the latest big releases of the genre.

Highly subjective, but i'm tired of personalized suggestions & feeds. Just because I watched or listened to something does not mean I want more of it. And imho 'just use a no history session' or 'click not interested' do not solve the problem, especially since the argument in favor of recommendations seems to be that it is 'more convenient for the user'.

Why can't I just browse instead? Spotify has a very extensive way of categorizing songs based on multiple characteristics (https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...), so why can't I just use that when searching for new music, directly in the normal app?

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#379

Post by rexreed »

IAmNotAFix wrote: post #149
vosper wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What is the money efficiency of that?

It's not about efficiency, it's about avoiding getting caught for criminal acts. Since criminals don't pay taxes on their earnings and don't have to pay for all sorts of things others do, they're already more "efficient"

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#380

Post by ryeights »

toxicFork wrote: post #134
josephcsible wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it really easy to avoid all these fake restaurants, since the fakes only appear when you're searching for takeout? Just pretend you want to dine in, find a restaurant that you want that way, then pull it up in your takeout app of choice.

That's not really easy. That's a lot of work.

Google Maps shows food delivery options now.
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