Probably more effective all around to turn your device off instead, and when you get your electricity bill, which will be a few cents cheaper as a result, send the band half the difference.
How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence
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Re: How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence
#12Perhaps this is why Pandora has the annoying "I'm still listening" button, so they don't have to pay out royalties on things their users aren't listening to.
Somewhat related: It's also probably why services like Netflix have the same thing built in ("I'm still watching" button after watching like 3 episodes of a show without clicking buttons), so some bot computer doesn't just stream and record everything.
I always figured that button was for people who fell asleep or had to leave their computers. It would be trivial to automate that prompt away for a malicious user.
Re: How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somewhat related: It's also probably why services like Netflix have the same thing built in ("I'm still watching" button after watching like 3 episodes of a show without clicking buttons), so some bot computer doesn't just stream and record everything.
I always figured that button was for people who fell asleep or had to leave their computers. It would be trivial to automate that prompt away for a malicious user.
Good point, that is probably true. Or possible so Netflix doesn't waste bandwidth on users that are not even there watching/listening.
Re: How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence
#14Silent tracks seem unnecessary. Why not play an actual album, but with the sound turned off?
Re: How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence
#15I bet you can't listen to anything from Vulfpeck on Spotify for much longer.
Re: How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence
#16I wonder how viable this would be for someone who wants to actually scam Spotify? For example, I'm assuming that with only minimal investment one could produce and submit a series of silent audio tracks. Then one could produce a field of virtualized instances of Spotify and a fleet of bots to "listen" to those tracks. But how expensive would all of that be? And at what scale would the operation be necessary to produc…
It's really wonderful to see capitalism fueling innovation like this. You would also need to include the cost of processing power + server time/aws vm's required. This assumes also that you won't get caught - extra work will probably be required in making your bots seem like "natural users" so they can't be detected.
Re: How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence
#17Best comment is on that Guardian page by a "LoveActuary":
I really hope that the album has a hidden track which is an ear-piercingly loud alarm.
Re: How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence
#18I wonder how viable this would be for someone who wants to actually scam Spotify? For example, I'm assuming that with only minimal investment one could produce and submit a series of silent audio tracks. Then one could produce a field of virtualized instances of Spotify and a fleet of bots to "listen" to those tracks. But how expensive would all of that be? And at what scale would the operation be necessary to produc…
It's really wonderful to see capitalism fueling innovation like this. You would also need to include the cost of processing power + server time/aws vm's required. This assumes also that you won't get caught - extra work will probably be required in making your bots seem like "natural users" so they can't be detected.
In my case it's more like "I wonder..." fueling innovation. But I'm also too lazy to try it, but if anyone else wants to give it a go and they end up making a profit, please send me along a 5% "idea man" fee :-)
On a more serious note, I wonder if this is something that Spotify already tries to detect? Or if it's such a ludicrous idea that they just assumed no one would really try it?
Re: How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence
#19I wonder how viable this would be for someone who wants to actually scam Spotify? For example, I'm assuming that with only minimal investment one could produce and submit a series of silent audio tracks. Then one could produce a field of virtualized instances of Spotify and a fleet of bots to "listen" to those tracks. But how expensive would all of that be? And at what scale would the operation be necessary to produc…
25M plays at 30 seconds per play would only take 208333 hours, not 7.5 million hours. Your 100,000 bots could make $100,000 in about 2 hours. Of course, if you actually tried this, it seems unlikely that it would go unnoticed.
Re: How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence
#20I wonder how viable this would be for someone who wants to actually scam Spotify? For example, I'm assuming that with only minimal investment one could produce and submit a series of silent audio tracks. Then one could produce a field of virtualized instances of Spotify and a fleet of bots to "listen" to those tracks. But how expensive would all of that be? And at what scale would the operation be necessary to produc…
EC2 Micros run about $0.02 per hour meaning it only takes about 5 plays per hour to be profitable, so you theoretically have ~115 plays that are profitable per hour per client, though its probably more like 100 including ads that play between songs. Assuming you can run more than 1 client per instance the numbers probably get even better. That being said if many people do this it probably gets increasingly less profitable, and also decreases the value of real listens.
Another interesting note is that the songs don't need to be silence. If you're automating this then your bots don't care if they are silent or just short and of questionable quality, which might make it easier to get the songs onto Spotify in the first place. You might even be able to get enough of them up to spread the scam among multiple artists/genres to avoid easy detection.