The songs that the AI CEO provided to Smith originally had file names full of randomized numbers and letters such as “n_7a2b2d74-1621-4385-895d-b1e4af78d860.mp3,” the DOJ noted in its detailed press release.
When uploading them to streaming platforms, including Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music, the man would then change the songs’ names to words like “Zygotes,” “Zygotic,” and “Zyme Bedewing,” whatever that is.
The artist naming convention also followed a somewhat similar pattern, with names ranging from the normal-sounding “Calvin Mann” to head-scratchers like “Calorie Event,” “Calms Scorching,” and “Calypso Xored.”
To manufacture streams for these fake songs, Smith allegedly used bots that stream the songs billions of times without any real person listening. As with similar schemes, the bots’ meaningless streams were ultimately converted to royalty paychecks for the people behind them.
No.
Music play-farming has been a thing for probably almost a decade by now.
Spotify divides the huge amount of money they get from subscribers each month, evenly among all the plays during that month.
Someone figured out ages ago, that since spotify has a free tier, that means that if you can get some tracks on spotify as an artist, you can then create an army of free-tier bot accounts and massively inflate the share of the money you get paid as an “artist”.
Of course, this comes at the cost of everyone elses legit plays becoming worth less. Its an absolutely disgusting scam and Spotify has been ignoring it happening for years.
Adding AI generation into the mix is barely an innovation.
Edit: And if you’re wondering how it works with services that don’t have a free tier, it is done by hijacking peoples real accounts, then having them stream the relevant tracks over and over. Either by stealing entire accounts, or infecting devices that are already logged in with malware that will open the relevant app/website and play the tracks over and over.
The solution, to me, would seem to be to divide the revenue up on an individual basis instead. Does some sort of licensing issue prevent this? I’d think that the legitimate record labels would want to fix this loophole ASAP so that they can get more money.
AFAIK YT Music does this. The money from your subscription gets divided amongst whatever you listened to.
That still wouldn’t address the stolen account problem, but yes, it’d be a huge improvement.
I have no idea why Spotify still sticks to this massively exploitable model, except for the fact that it MASSIVELY inflates their stats for investors and advertisers.
Ah yes, the Reddit strategy.
That’s super cool to know. Seems more fair than the way Spotify does it?
Fuck Spotify, they can eat a bag of dicks after renewing Joe cum-guzzling Rogan for $200million. They deserve to have all of their money stolen.
Spotify is losing nothing. They take their cut either way.
The only people getting their money stolen are real artists. Their share of the income shrinks as these scammers inflate the number of plays that the money is shared between.
I didn’t realize it was a thing. Thanks for taking the time to explain!
It seems like it would be super easy for them to close this loophole. If you use the model that free tier listeners (real ones) will listen to about the same distribution of songs as the paying listeners, then just stop counting all free tier listeners and multiply the amount paid out for the pay-tier listeners by an appropriate factor to make payouts the same as before.