21–30 of 64 posts
I 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…
John Lennon and Yoko Ono also did "Two Minutes of Silence"[1], which was later covered by Soundgarden as "One Minute of Silence" on the album Ultramega OK (they didn't like Yoko Ono's minute, so they only covered Lennon's[2].)
As Debussy famously remarked, "Music is the space between the notes."[3]
[0] Of course, that means they should probably be paying royalties to the Cage estate, but that's a separate matter....
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfinished_Music_No._2:_Life_w...
Earlier 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.
Perhaps 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.
If they don't require you to keep clicking a button to "request content", it doesn't count as an on-demand service.
Silent tracks seem unnecessary. Why not play an actual album, but with the sound turned off?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
You put the wrong part in scare quotes. The word you're looking for is "arbitrage," not "innovation." Some guy figured out that Spotify pays more to send data than Amazon charges to accept and discard it. Eventually Spotify will pay someone to reject this particular scam, then to reject more sophisticated versions, then to reject legitimate songs that look a bit like scams, etc. That's just how things work.
I 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 profi…
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.
I'm sure this is against Spotify's TOS in some way.
I'm sure this is against Spotify's TOS in some way.