Mystery tracks being 'forced' on your Spotify • Hacker News Board

Re: Mystery tracks being 'forced' on your Spotify

#51

Post by rv-de » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 2:45 PM UTC

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.

If it sounds to like that

then listen closer

as you will hear nothing but silence

for those songs do not exist.

Re: Mystery tracks being 'forced' on your Spotify

#52

Post by byte1918 » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

hiliev wrote: post #7

To me it sounds like someone at Spotify messed up and ran dev experiments on the production system instead in the staging environment.

I initially thought the same but it's weird that some of these artists have twitter accounts. As far as I know Spotify doesn't have any twitter support, well, at least not on the current latest version.

Re: Mystery tracks being 'forced' on your Spotify

#53

Post by rv-de » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 2:48 PM UTC

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #13

This happened to me - apparently I spent 34 hours last year listening to a song called "Bear Claws" by an artist called Andrew Brady. I did some digging and all I could find was an Irish guy on Twitter with 2 tweets to his name. The song and the artist no longer existed on Spotify last time I checked. The odd thing is that these songs never seem to show up in my play history. I did link Spotify to Facebook at one poi…

I can only find one song by Andrew Brady named "Fairytale of New York". Actually quite a good song. Also lots of lyrics - so not really the kind referred to in the article.

Re: Mystery tracks being 'forced' on your Spotify

#54

Post by sandrobfc » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

peteretep wrote: post #47

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…

> 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. Flesh this out for me, because it's hilarious. How are Spotify making money from that, exactly? I listen to Discover Weekly most weeks, and if Spotify is generating them, then: A) They're creating…

They are not making money from Discover Weekly, but they make money from made-up artists, since they don't have to pay anyone to have that music up there. It's easy to do the math from there.

The work they have in making a few artists up is nothing compared to what they would have to pay for an actual artist to have their albuns there.

Re: Mystery tracks being 'forced' on your Spotify

#55

Post by sandrobfc » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

breakingcups wrote: post #34

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…

Do you have any proof whatsoever to support your bold statements? My Discover Weekly is usually great every week and I've discovered many (real!) cool artists that I like through it. It's possible there's a lot of low quality filler music on Spotify and that your account got algorithmically lumped in the bucket to get there recommended, but to say Spotify is "in on it" seems like a very big leap.

I just can't trust it when an instrumental song by a band that I can't find anywhere else kicks in. I'm not saying that Discover Weekly can't provide you great artists that you don't know, but I can't trust it. It leaves me with the sense that I've been tricked and I'd rather avoid it all together.

Re: Mystery tracks being 'forced' on your Spotify

#56

Post by timeu » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:28 PM UTC

tikkabhuna wrote: post #20

Very interesting! I had something that sounds similar to this a couple of years ago. My Spotify had a new music "Device" listed with a weird name. Frequently the device would be selected and a song I'd never heard of would start playing, with no sound as it went to the rogue music device. On my Spotify account I could see a new linked application that I hadn't ever setup. I deleted it, kicked out any logins that Spot…

I had exactly the same issue. But in my case I setup a device password that probably was in one of the PW leaks. I was listening to spotify on my phone and suddenly it switched to a different device unknown to me and played mostly latin songs. When I changed the device pw it stopped

Re: Mystery tracks being 'forced' on your Spotify

#57

Post by usrusr » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 4:16 PM UTC

HelenePhisher wrote: post #46

usrusr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Haha, yeah, it really is! ;) The other one is a good question as well. Spotify pays out when a song has been listened to for at least 30 seconds. This has been abused in the past as well: https://qz.com/1212330/a-bulgarian-scheme-scammed-spotify-fo... The article says it is not clear if the fraudsters abused existing user accounts or set up a farm. But apparently, the songs have been played. They all were exactly 30…

> They all were exactly 30 seconds

Talk about easy to spot! Maybe the defensive team is deliberately keeping their countermeasures low-profile (don't block anything except payout) to make it harder for attackers to iteratively adapt? Similar to the way shadowbanning is magnitudes more effective than banning.

Re: Mystery tracks being 'forced' on your Spotify

#58

Post by Illniyar » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

bostik wrote: post #42

Illniyar wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Goodness me, no. They could be fetching all values for a given key (for performance reasons, since the seek for a read is surprisingly expensive). Depending on how they then use that data, these short and plentiful tracks can end up being included instead of dropped.

Sorry if I'm being obtuse but why would they be using a hash as a key instead of a uuid? I've never heard of any distributed system (or any system) that use hash as a key. Or are you saying there is somekind of auxiliary hash table in use for performance somewhere?

Re: Mystery tracks being 'forced' on your Spotify

#59

Post by mikelyons » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 5:25 PM UTC

Recently mysteriously had all my playlists deleted and lots of tracks I never played had been played and weird playlists added in place of mine. Went and reset all 3rd party access and reinstated my playlists and it hasn't happened again since. I chalked it up to maybe logging in on someone elses mobile device while travelling to play my playlist and then forgetting and then they did it, but maybe it was bad actors over the internet. I'll never know.

Re: Mystery tracks being 'forced' on your Spotify

#60

Post by self » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 6:50 PM UTC

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.

It can't be a hash collision if the mysterious tracks/artists are no longer on Spotify. If Spotify deleted the artists or tracks instead of giving them new ids, that suggests something else is going on.