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An odd discovery on Spotify

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Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#401

Post by dangrossman »

josephcsible wrote: post #375
toxicFork wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

On the delivery services, you can search all of the menus of places that deliver to you at once. If I want a club sandwich, I can find what 32 restaurants will deliver me a club sandwich. There is no other place I know of that will tell me what restaurants in some radius of me sell club sandwiches for dine-in, that I'd then have to cross-reference with which are available on my preferred delivery service anyway. It's a lot more work.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#402

Post by dangrossman »

MockObject wrote: post #383
asdff wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In my experience, it's inferior in every way, perhaps because they have no accountability the same way a standalone restaurant has. For example, a pizza place near me opened multiple ghost kitchens, including a Saladworks and Guy Fieri's Flavortown.

There's no Saladworks if you visit their address, just the pizza place. They offer the same menu as Saladworks, the chain of fast service salad shops, but don't have the same supplier or training or equipment as a Saladworks. This pizza place just attempts to recreate the same salads using inferior ingredients, pizza toppings, generic dressings, and generic plastic takeout containers. The result doesn't taste like a Saladworks salad and is smaller than a Saladworks salad. I've tried it twice and neither recreation of Saladworks was faithful, missing ingredients both times, with a different lettuce mix than Saladworks uses, etc.

There's no Guy Fieri restaurant if you visit their address either. The food from this brand of the ghost kitchen is just inedible. It has 5 reviews on Yelp locally so far, and all are one star. They're microwaving burgers, sending out raw pasta, sending out easy mac with pizza toppings as a fancy loaded mac & cheese, using the same generic plastic takeout containers they do for Saladworks.

And yet at least they have a brand to burn. What I was actually frustrated with in my comment a few levels up is the places that list their own menu, sliced and diced in different ways, under 20+ different names. If someone complains about the quality of "Simply Crepes", they can just remove that listing, since those crepes are also available under "Morning Times Cafe", "Morning Breakfast Sandwich Bar", "The Daily Fare", "The Coffee Creperey", etc.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#403

Post by folkrav »

nightpool wrote: post #382
rexreed wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Diversification, I guess? Having multiple concurrent laundering streams, so if one dies, the rest can keep going?

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#404

Post by squeaky-clean »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #181
kixiQu wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And on the file level, it is! But then do you as a music player / streaming service display that all the time, when most people are not listening to classical music and do not care about the composer? Do you make the user manage which columns are visible? (Almost every HN user misses when more software did this. Almost every normal user found it confusing/annoying.) What about publishers who do not give a damn that J…

Isn't it principally an industry thing to hide the composer, they don't want us to know that the pop is from a "factory" and picked for the artist, they want the public to believe the myth that the manufactured band sit on mountaintops with their instruments coming up with new grooves (or whatever). Can't you just let the user decide "artist + track" or "artist + composer(s) + track" or ...

That's their point though, it's not the same across musical industries.

Pop music? Yeah people don't care about the composer credits.

Classical music or a jazz standards band? You want the performing artist and the composer.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#405

Post by remuskaos »

vintermann wrote: post #218
remuskaos wrote: post #82

Ooh, I think I found something like that too , a few years ago. I searched for a song (a real one, that I already knew) called "Dyson Sphere". That search still yields a few hits. One of those was by an artist called Adal, and while it wasn't what I was looking for at all, I still listened to it. It was slow, rythmic and very simple music (think "human music"). When I looked for other works of this Adal, they had may…

No, they're there on all the streaming services. YouTube reveals that it got there via DistroKid. I don't think it's spam, exactly - a spammer doesn't bother with choosing a theme in track titles as such. But it is possibly fairly low effort, as much DistroKid music is...

You're right, I just found them on YouTube and Tidal. Low effort is a good description though, the entire album is insanely repetitive.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#406

Post by asdff »

MockObject wrote: post #383
asdff wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It tasted like it cost about $6 too much for what it was

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#407

Post by Melting_Harps »

unethical_ban wrote: post #310
djmips wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that's a rabbit hole! https://www.theedgemarkets.com/article/prosecution-tells-jur...

That site screams "malware delivery" or spam at the least.

> That site screams "malware delivery" or spam at the least.

I was intrigued since I recall the 1MDB scam, but didn't know all the details about it so I archived it [0].

0: https://archive.ph/HuEbS

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#408

Post by dustinmoris »

yesbabyyes wrote: post #148
dustinmoris wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this money laundering? If you use dirty money to sign up to Spotify and listen to specific songs so that you get some of the money “clean” back wouldn’t that in case of Spotify be the dumbest and most inefficient way of laundering in the history of money laundering? I mean doesn’t Spotify keep the majority so you’re essentially donating dirty money into the stock price of Spotify for the most part, no?

Not necessarily. Let's say you get a burner phone and hook it up at home. You need internet and electricity of course. Buy a Spotify gift card for $10 USD cash, use that to get Spotify Premium (first use the three months free of course). Play your (artists') songs, 30 seconds each (considered one stream by Spotify). That's 2880 streams per hour, 86400 streams per month. Spotify pays around $2-$4 USD per 1000 streams,…

Who launders pocket money? Anything less than hundreds of thousands of dollars is just not worth laundering. Nobody is going to ask you where you got a few 10k from.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#409

Post by DrSiemer »

kennend3 wrote: post #392
243423443 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you only listen to English songs?

i would think it would be obvious, but here goes - because i only speak/understand English?

That's exactly why I enjoy listening to foreign pop music: I cannot hear how vapid the lyrics are.

But besides that, great music does not need to spell it out to convey meaning and emotion.

If the appreciation of a foreign song keeps growing, I will eventually look up a few translations. Their mixed interpretation usually only enhances an already enjoyable experience.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#410

Post by i_love_limes »

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 thread has quietened down now, so I'd like to ask about those forums you were talking about. I'm really curious about them and would love to have a closer look, but I completely understand if you don't want to divulge that kind of information.
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