Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An odd discovery on Spotify

robinsloan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 442 posts

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#91

Post by thayne »

thematrixturtle wrote: post #57
usednet wrote: post #28

People have been noticing this a lot recently but what nobody seems to know is that this is a form of money laundering/“scamming.” I know because I used to be active on crime forums and talked to some of the people who engineered this scheme. People will set up fake Spotify artist accounts with stolen identities and bank accounts, pay a musician for songs that pass as music, and then bot millions of streams on them.…

That almost makes sense, except that the money is paid out to the artist, so if you're using a stolen bank account, it remains 'dirty' after the round-trip. What you'd want to do is use the dirty money for the bots that drive up the revenue, and the clean account for the artist to collect the royalties. This way the artist has plausible deniability, and if the bank account paying for the bots gets busted, it doesn't…

Isn't that what the parent described?

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#92

Post by killjoywashere »

Local Kitchens is like this. They have a single storefront serving 19 different cuisines. I'm guessing they're waiting to see if one or two pop off with the local community? Interesting to see this "algorithmic surface area" issue popping up somewhere else. Is this standard business school training?

https://www.localkitchens.com/

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#93

Post by function_seven »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #60
p1necone wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you kinda have a point when it's one physical location presenting itself as multiple different options whose food would never belong on the same menu together at a dine in restaurant in the first place. Where I think it's shady is one kitchen pretending to be 10 different restaurants all serving the same type of food under different restaurant names, just to basically game the system into presenting them to m…

My thinking is, if the food is good, I couldn't care less if they are selling sushi, lawn furniture, plumbing supplies, and car insurance out of the same building. If the food is not good, see above. And if Uber Eats is dumb enough to fall for 10 Indian restaurants with the same physical street address and controlling interest, well... party on.

But that's just it. If the food is no good, then you may avoid "Wing Bucket" in the future. But then you try out "Thrilled Cheese" and it sucks, too! Okay, mark that one down as crappy. A month later you check out "Super Mega Dilla" and damn if it isn't shitty microwaved food as well.

A real restaurant in the real world can't play this game. Sure, there are combo KFC/Taco Bells out there, but it's not some sort of subterfuge. Obviously those locations are combining the two brands into one kitchen. Do with that info what you will.

When browsing options on an app, there is no similar affordance. You have to play detective to discover that IHOP, Super Mega Dilla, Wing Bucket, and Thrilled Cheese are all the same place. And only one of those is a real brand that carries any kind of reputation. The others can be burned at will if they don't work.

What frustrates me is that this scheme seems to be working? It's been like this for a while now, and I don't understand why people keep using these delivery apps. Cold food, delivered late, for twice the price, from a phony restaurant, by a gig worker that is more often than not getting shafted on their own expenses. What's not to love?

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#94

Post by asdff »

dangrossman wrote: post #6

> A single kitchen operating under many names to increase its algorithmic “surface area”; another shape of things to come. I find this infuriating. There's one dominican restaurant in my city that's listed on DoorDash, Grubhub and UberEats under over 20 different names with different subsets of their menu. All of these duplicate listings for the same place make it harder to search or browse the actual restaurant opti…

It's really bewildering when this happens. I've accidentally picked up food from one of these places and I nearly could not find it. It was a faceless nondescript commercial building that looked abandoned until I saw someone else walk out the door with their food order. Then I walked in and the place looked like some industrial building versus a restaurant. There was just cement floor in a small room, and I gave my order through a metal lined hole in the wall and they gave me my bag. Very oddly, in the background, I noticed Chic Fil A also being prepared in this ghost kitchen by people in tshirts. Such a strange concept. I made sure to never order food from a place that wasn't a brick and mortar again, and to call up restaurants directly.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#95

Post by duped »

caseyross wrote: post #20

With the success of AI content generation for text (GPT-3 etc.) and images (DALL-E etc.), it seems inevitable that music will soon be targeted as well, if not already. What's particularly interesting in the music sphere is that there are already well-established trends towards building a sort of ambient, atmospheric, generated soundscape. (For example, the famous "Lo-Fi girl" stream.) AI-generated content is a very n…

They always have relied on live performance (and to a greater extent, education). Talk to some professionals in the industry some time, they're not going to talk about records as a source of income.

I could write a ten page rant on why AI and automation aren't a threat to musicians but it basically boils down to the fact that music is a human spectacle and we will continue to grow the industry through performing live music much like a robot that can mimic Tom Brady isn't a threat to teams selling tickets to see Tom Brady play live and people to watch it on TV (which exists, by the way).

At the end of the day, technology that lowers the barrier to entry for records and distribution is a massive boon to the industry at all levels. The rising tide lifts all boats. The companies doing interesting things with AI in music aren't just generating old shit, they're making tools to give to the next generation of creators to create new shit that no training can replicate, because it has never been done.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#96

Post by labster »

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #35
DecoPerson wrote: post #7

In the “Release Radar” generated for me last week, there was a 40 second song consisting of rhythmic mechanical noises with a strange title and album art of an alien head. I didn’t like it at all. I think it was recommended to me because the publisher listed its artist as “Fanny Mendelssohn” — a classical composer whose work I definitely enjoy and have probably pressed “Like” a few times on — even though the song had…

> How on earth can Spotify distinguish real Fanny from fake Fanny? I can't tell if the post is serious or just a setup now.

Wasn’t the whole point of Brexit to have less regulation on things like region of origin? British Fanny is just as good as continental Fanny, even if it isn’t as popular. It’s not “fake Fanny”, it just gets less exposure.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#97

Post by thematrixturtle »

thayne wrote: post #91
thematrixturtle wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That almost makes sense, except that the money is paid out to the artist, so if you're using a stolen bank account, it remains 'dirty' after the round-trip. What you'd want to do is use the dirty money for the bots that drive up the revenue, and the clean account for the artist to collect the royalties. This way the artist has plausible deniability, and if the bank account paying for the bots gets busted, it doesn't…

Isn't that what the parent described?

No, they suggested using stolen bank accounts to receive the artist royalties.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#98

Post by johnorourke »

ciropantera wrote: post #90
derbOac wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next step in this, of course, is Spotify just generating music on the fly algorithmically based on your choices. Skip the middleman, so to speak. Maybe it is Spotify behind it?

I heard a similar story a couple of years ago: some no-name artist with a fairly good amount of plays on Spotify who could not be found anywhere else online. It was less obviously ai-generated back then (more instrumental than vibe/ambient), so it was speculated that it could be a musician working on commission for Spotify, who was then stuffing their playlists with these songs to cut costs. I can't find any traces o…

This story perhaps: https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/fake-artists-have-...

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#99

Post by thewebcount »

macNchz wrote: post #18
tigerBL00D wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I listened to the playlist and it's definitely the same song over and over again with slight tweaks. Imagine finding dozens of blogs where posts are all the same, but with very slight changes to vocabulary used in each blog.

There has actually been a lot of that showing up in my google search results for the past few years… there are thousands of sites out there that were created by scraping news articles and blog posts and replacing random words with thesaurus alternatives. The results vary from incomprehensible to some kind of uncanny valley “is this just…really terrible writing or am I having a brain problem?” territory. I’ve actually…

> The results vary from incomprehensible to some kind of uncanny valley “is this just…really terrible writing or am I having a brain problem?” territory.

I’m glad it’s not just me! But for me, it’s not just random searches. It also happens with news articles from major outlets. Can they really not afford to pay a single person to just proof read the story and make sure whatever’s auto-generated is at least coherent?

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#100

Post by VintageCool »

INTPenis wrote: post #81
jeremyjh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs money to run the streams but Spotify pays some of that back out to the "artists"; that money sounds plausibly pretty clean. Until there was a thread at the top of HN about it and everyone suddenly knew how it worked. Of course GP might just be a GPT3 experiment...

What does it cost an artist to run a stream? I thought Spotify hosted the content. Do you mean it costs money to run the bots that listen to the stream and get the artist recommended and heard by more people?

Who knows, maybe the bots even have legitimate Spotify listener accounts.
Post reply on HN