How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence

#31

Post by loopdoend » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 4:00 PM UTC

natdempk wrote: post #20

zacinbusiness wrote: post #9

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…

EC2 micros run less than half a cent per hour using spot requests, but I'm not sure why Spotify would want to pay out on obvious non-human use.

One would be better off using a large instance, perhaps running OpenVZ, and proxying the data through residential IPs.

Re: How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence

#32

Post by sharkweek » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 4:08 PM UTC

chimeracoder wrote: post #22

As a huge fan of John Cage, I feel obligated to point out that this is not "scamming" - it is a true performance of a musical work[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3 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 Deb…

While these are great, let's swing the conversation the other direction and rock out to some of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music - I'm still not convinced anyone has actually listened to it all the way through.

But seriously, I love any attempt at stretching the boundaries of music as a performance art, because who the hell are we to tell musicians what they can and can't do

Re: How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence

#33

Post by gordaco » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 4:25 PM UTC

blueblob wrote: post #2

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.

Youtube's playlists also have it. It's annoying when I'm listening to a playlist at work and it suddenly stops, although if I'm deep enough in the zone I don't notice it until some minutes later.

Re: How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence

#34

Post by sabhiram » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 4:29 PM UTC

This is no different than a click(listen) farm.

Lets slap a new virtual currency together and make listening to the song on spotify the proof of work! Bingo, straight to the moon!

Re: How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence

#35

Post by sdepablos » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 4:31 PM UTC

I was on the understanding that Spotify payed on unique users per month per song, not on the number of individual plays of a song.

Re: How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence

#36

Post by joshdance » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 4:41 PM UTC

Hello silence my old friend, you've come to make me money again.

Re: How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence

#37

Post by schnevets » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 4:42 PM UTC

During the iTunes heyday, artists like Billy Corgan complained that selling individual songs for a dollar would be the death of the album. Eight years later, the optimal model for streaming services appear to be churning out as many small songs as possible. Perhaps more concept albums like this one will follow?

Re: How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence

#38

Post by Dirlewanger » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 4:45 PM UTC

This can be patched in 2 minutes with a "Are you still here?" prompt. Can't believe this is a news article, wow.

Re: How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence

#39

Post by aneisf » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 4:47 PM UTC

sharkweek wrote: post #32

chimeracoder wrote: post #22

As a huge fan of John Cage, I feel obligated to point out that this is not "scamming" - it is a true performance of a musical work[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3 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 Deb…

While these are great, let's swing the conversation the other direction and rock out to some of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music - I'm still not convinced anyone has actually listened to it all the way through. But seriously, I love any attempt at stretching the boundaries of music as a performance art, because who the hell are we to tell musicians what they can and can't do

Metal Machine Music is a great album, and relatively quite tame by modern noise music standards.

Re: How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence

#40

Post by GFischer » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 4:48 PM UTC

isaacremuant wrote: post #23

tokenizerrr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

not as easy but still, doable by someone with determination and a simple knowledge of computer vision and UI simulation.

It is really trivial, there are several programs that automate UIs, I remember them from trying my hand at automating trading for a game which didn't provide an API :) .

Automate 7 was really impressive, and they're at version 9 now

http://www.networkautomation.com/automate/automate/