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An odd discovery on Spotify

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Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#381

Post by hannasanarion »

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 piece of hardware for the bot to do the streaming on so it sneaks past the spotify bot detectors, and you probably also want to pay for a premium account for each bot so that you get a bigger payout on the other side, since premium users generate bigger royalties.

Making it expensive to operate an effective bot farm is part of the way that spotify tries to discourage botting. Spotify's bot detectors are good enough that it's not lucrative to just make a bunch of bots to give yourself streams for the free royalty money, but apparently not yet quite so good that it's not feasible to use bots to turn a large amount of dirty money into a lesser but still substantial amount of clean royalty money by way of funding a bot farm.

Getting out, say, half of what you put in is a losing prospect for somebody who wants a money printer, but might be acceptable to a money launderer.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#382

Post by nightpool »

rexreed wrote: post #379
IAmNotAFix wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Sure, but if you're going through a distribution service that has a 60/40 split with Spotify, are you going to be okay with 40% of your laundered proceeds getting eaten by Spotify? How does that compare to other laundering opportunities? And that's not even counting the costs imposed by your distributer. For example, if you have 1,000 tracks, on TuneCore that's $10,000 dollars just for track distribution, as well as a $50 per-album yearly fee. It does seem somewhat inefficient, and very easy for Spotify to notice and crack down on. (But they don't have a lot of incentive to look too closely, since they're getting paid handsomely for it...)

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#383

Post by MockObject »

asdff wrote: post #94
dangrossman wrote: post #6

> A single kitchen operating under many names to increase its algorithmic “surface area”; another shape of things to come. I find this infuriating. There's one dominican restaurant in my city that's listed on DoorDash, Grubhub and UberEats under over 20 different names with different subsets of their menu. All of these duplicate listings for the same place make it harder to search or browse the actual restaurant opti…

It's really bewildering when this happens. I've accidentally picked up food from one of these places and I nearly could not find it. It was a faceless nondescript commercial building that looked abandoned until I saw someone else walk out the door with their food order. Then I walked in and the place looked like some industrial building versus a restaurant. There was just cement floor in a small room, and I gave my o…

> I made sure to never order food from a place that wasn't a brick and mortar again

What's wrong with food from a ghost kitchen?

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#384

Post by folkrav »

philsnow wrote: post #373
folkrav wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Funny, maybe it's a language thing (French speaking) but to me the first thing that comes to mind when speaking about feeds is "RSS", so I genuinely never made the connection.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#385

Post by alexambarch »

Tangentially Related:

The experimental artist Arca released an album[1] in 2020 which consisted of 100 AI-generated remixes of her song Riquiqui. It was part pretentious artsy experiment and part marketing stunt for some AI company, but an interesting concept nonetheless.

[1]:https://open.spotify.com/album/3bd81d2yQGiDRzckcQ42dr

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#386

Post by gabereiser »

nosianu wrote: post #131
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'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…

The YouTube recommendation engine seems to overweigh tangent content. For example. If your recommendations are all puppy videos (awww) and you go watch Jonathan Blow talk about why programmers aren't productive anymore, you'll get a whole new feed of "How to learn Rust in 100 seconds" crap.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#387

Post by petercooper »

I know it was a rhetorical question about how to produce such tracks en masse, but Sonic Pi would be reasonably good at this if you ever did want to algorithmically generate a ton of tracks using the same stems.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#388

Post by the_other »

schnable wrote: post #367
ZiiS wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All they need to do is filter out content with genre=kids from recs. They could create a separate kids recommendation item if people actually want that.

This wont happen whilst they have family and kids’ account types. Charge parents more for the premium option of not filling their carefully curated genre recommendations with nursery rhymes and Ed Sheeran.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#389

Post by exikyut »

vintermann wrote: post #121
vintermann wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't assume they're just targeting Spotify. Spotify is (or used to be) the best at catching algorithmic spam, the other streaming services hardly care at all. Likely they use a front service such as TuneCore which gives them access to all the streaming services. Just using Spotify is unnecessary risky if the goal is simply money laundering. (However, if the goal is to do pick up some royalties from all those backgro…

The spammer is still at it, I see: https://www.deezer.com/search/%22From%20the%20box%22/album

FWIW this is all I see, not logged in (never had an account), from AU: https://imgur.com/a/HXpn9JG

Not sure if I'm seeing something different to you...?

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#390

Post by srndsnd »

levoea wrote: post #377
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…

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 i…

All these recommendation engine problems people aren't discussing here aren't bugs or problems, they're features. They're either pushing the content that makes people engage with the platform the longest, or that promote another feature that the platform is trying to push on you. With YouTube, it's MrBeast style videos, influencer bait, and shorts. With Spotify, it's for sure podcasts.

Podcasts are so heavily pushed by Spotify because they're trying to make themselves the centralized one stop shop for your audio consumption. They didn't pay Joe Rogan millions for no reason.

As a man under thirty, I see the JRE logo on the front page of my Spotify at least five or six times a month. I have no interest in listening to podcasts on Spotify. I very much dislike Joe Rogan. I hit the option to not request it to me again, and yet there it is.

They're not recommendations based on your taste. They're a mix of just enough of your taste so that you trust and buy-in, mixed with whatever flavor of the week the recommendation engine would love to sell you.

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