Mystery tracks being 'forced' on your Spotify

Post by bostik » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 12:42 PM UTC

Illniyar wrote: post #21

bostik wrote: post #8

Funny, to me this sounds like a hash collision. (For a map key, not the cryptographic kind.) Knowing only that Spotify is a large distributed system, and seeing that the mystery tracks are short in title and length, as well as plentiful, it feels like a these tracks are ending up as collisions in a distributed hash table. From there it'd be a matter of bubbling up top due to sorting order properties.

Are you suggesting that spotify is somewherre using a hash-table without a collision resolution method (like a linked list). Is that something that is done in some industries? Hash collisions to me has always been a performance problem not a correctness one.

Post by retSava » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 12:46 PM UTC

jatsign wrote: post #35

Off topic but somewhat related - my corporate overlords don't let us install anything on our workstations and the browsers we use are old and not supported by play.spotify.com. Any bright ideas about how I can use spotify here?

Post by HelenePhisher » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 1:07 PM UTC

usrusr wrote: post #36

HelenePhisher wrote: post #11

It's quite clear to me that this s a fraud to make money. Those tracks are produced by algorithms and played via access tokens gathered from sites like the playlist converters floating around. Be wary of your account data and check the access of 3rd party apps regularly. https://support.spotify.com/uk/account_payment_help/privacy/... for information how to do that for Spotify.

I wonder if those tracks have actually been played or if someone just found a way to game the play counters. Lesson for anyone who ponders the idea of open monetization models (the every-popular vision of giving X per month and having it automatically split up and distributed to creators proportionally to actual consumption): there will be bad actors trying to cheat. PS: why is your username so perfectly on topic?

Post by peapicker » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 2:09 PM UTC

SyneRyder wrote: post #31

sandrobfc wrote: post #19

This is why I refuse to play the Discover Weekly playlist. I strongly believe that Spotify is getting money out of made up artists, with songs put up by algorithms in some way, and that's the best way to get them to you. Regarding the 'hacking', it never happened to me, but it's easy to see how troublesome that may be. But that's what we get for trusting an application that promises to get us free music forever. It h…

I wouldn't be afraid of the Discover Weekly playlist. I think it's Spotify's best feature. For me, it surfaces great songs & artists I hadn't heard before, and sometimes it's almost spookily accurate. For Discover Weekly to work though, it helps to feed it good data. It's based on a PageRank-like system, but instead of webpages it's based on user playlists [1]. If you create some of your own playlists, it will go and…

Post by schnevets » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 2:24 PM UTC

egoisticalgoat wrote: post #9

no_gravity wrote: post #2

racking up thousands of listens and (perhaps) hundreds of pounds I thought artists earn something like $5 per 1000 plays these days?

According to an expert in the article, you can expect almost double that. "[...] one expert, Mark Mulligan of Midia Research, told BBC Trending radio that Bergenulo Five could have made about $500 to $600 (about £380 to £460) from 60,000 streams"