[HN Gopher] An odd discovery on Spotify
___________________________________________________________________
An odd discovery on Spotify
Author : breathenow
Score : 973 points
Date : 2022-08-23 00:30 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.robinsloan.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.robinsloan.com)
| wigster wrote:
| This almost sounds like the start of a Call of Cthulhu TTRPG
| scenario where a something really grim is being fed into public
| media pool for some nefarious purpose. Hmm. Nice.
| imgabe wrote:
| I wonder if there are perhaps "attractors" (like chaotic
| attractors) in Spotify's recommendation algorithm. Like some
| sequence where it plays song A and that recommends song B which
| recommends song C which recommends song A again and it gets stuck
| in a loop (but longer / more complex).
|
| If someone managed to generate a collection of songs that are all
| similar in the right ways to pop up when people leave the
| recommended playlists playing, they could rack of thousands of
| plays without all the trouble of having musical talent and
| writing good songs.
| [deleted]
| remuskaos wrote:
| Ooh, I think I found something like that too , a few years ago. I
| searched for a song (a real one, that I already knew) called
| "Dyson Sphere". That search still yields a few hits.
|
| One of those was by an artist called Adal, and while it wasn't
| what I was looking for at all, I still listened to it. It was
| slow, rythmic and very simple music (think "human music"). When I
| looked for other works of this Adal, they had maybe like 8 songs,
| all of them the same simple melody but slightly different speed,
| rhythm and so on. At first I thought I was listening to that same
| song, but there definitely were slight differences.
|
| At the time I didn't understand why anyone would produce such a
| thing, but in this context it makes much more sense.
|
| I just searched again for Adal - Dyson Sphere, but there seem to
| be no hits. I wonder if the artist has since been deleted.
| vintermann wrote:
| No, they're there on all the streaming services. YouTube
| reveals that it got there via DistroKid. I don't think it's
| spam, exactly - a spammer doesn't bother with choosing a theme
| in track titles as such. But it is possibly fairly low effort,
| as much DistroKid music is...
| remuskaos wrote:
| You're right, I just found them on YouTube and Tidal. Low
| effort is a good description though, the entire album is
| insanely repetitive.
| michaericalribo wrote:
| Your memories of Adal seem unreliable Are you sure you are
| remembering correctly is it possible it was a different name
| There Is No Musician Named Adal I'm sorry your query "Adal" did
| not return any hits The name Adal is invalid please re-enter a
| real musician You have misremembered aAdDal is nothing Invalid
| Entry: Confirmed: No Entity ADAL In Human History.
| dharmit wrote:
| This sounds quite familiar to what Yuval Noah Harari mentioned in
| his book "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" where he talks about
| how smart devices attached to our bodies and AI would be able to
| generate and play music based on what the sensors detect our
| feelings are.
| SethMurphy wrote:
| Music has always confirmed to the medium. The standard song
| structure of pop no longer serves the medium's purpose. I wholly
| expect pop songs to get shorter on average and take advantage of
| what social media has trained our brains to consume.
| j-bos wrote:
| The post was interesting, but I also noticed something in the
| blog that had the same flavor. Even though the link was for a
| specific post, the page layout neatly flowed into another post.
| So smooth I thought the second post's title was a subheading of
| the original article. A strange thing, but maybe that's just me
| making connections that aren't there.
| tekstar wrote:
| Robin sends out a weekly(?) newsletter with a variety of
| topics.
| johncoatesdev wrote:
| Looks like this is a link to an issue of a newsletter and it's
| divided into sections.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| I think OP is being ironic..
| j-bos wrote:
| Haha, sadly I was only being confused.
| tigerBL00D wrote:
| 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.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| The "horn instrument" being reused in every song is a
| giveaway that they're using the same generator, without even
| changing the parameters of the instruments.
|
| It's like they're basically using a fancy "arpeggiator" to
| generate these songs.
| macNchz wrote:
| 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 encountered lively discussions of these sorts
| of cloned articles with nary a mention of the weird writing.
|
| With what we've seen from AI text and image generators
| recently, it's only going to get weirder soon.
| thewebcount wrote:
| > 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?
| netsharc wrote:
| YouTube is also full of this, with bots narrating the story
| using text-to-speech, some of them sound passable as
| humans...
| LelouBil wrote:
| Websites that scrape StackOverflow are the WORST!
|
| It's always giving me false hopes that my problem got
| resolved until I notice that I've alrezdy read the question
| before.
| bpye wrote:
| There's one site that scrapes GitHub as well - it does at
| least have a link to the original page, but I've only
| ever opened it by mistake...
| xvello wrote:
| There is a community-maintained list of these
| stackoverflow / github / npm / wikipedia clones, and
| adblocking rules to hide them from search results:
| https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
|
| These lists are supported as presets in
| https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results
| cardamomo wrote:
| I recall reading an article on HN a while ago about how
| recipe/cooking blogs are basically becoming just that--
| centrally run networks of independently branded sites that
| just serve to drive clicks on affiliate links. But then
| again, I can't find that link, so it's probably a conspiracy
| theory I just made up
| gammarator wrote:
| Or the original whistleblower was offed by Big Recipe.
| w_for_wumbo wrote:
| I listened to the playlist too and it's definitely the same
| song with small variations. Imagine finding dozens of threads
| where comments are all the same, but with very slight changes
| of words used in each comment.
| quercusa wrote:
| I'm sure _that_ would never happen.
| dashwehacct wrote:
| I listened to that playlist as well and it is nearly the
| same song with slight variations. Imagine finding dozens of
| threads where comments are all the same, but with very
| small changes of phrasing used in each comment.
| 20after4 wrote:
| I listened to that comment thread as well and it is very
| similar to the playlist, only with slight variations.
| Imagine finding hundreds of threads where the colors are
| all the same, but with very small changes in the pattern
| as they are all woven into a blanket.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| I listened to the users also and it's nearly the same
| comment with minor variations. Imagine finding dozens of
| threads where the jokes are all the same, but with very
| unsubstantive changes in phrasing as the site is turning
| into Reddit.
| pnt12 wrote:
| I listened to mgdlbp also and it's nearly the same
| comment with minor variations. Imagine finding dozens of
| posts where the rants are all the same, but with very
| unsubstantive reasons in phrasing, as the old userbase
| complains about the new userbase ad nauseam.
| Applejinx wrote:
| I didn't listen :)
| someweirdperson wrote:
| > I listened to the users ...
|
| No way! No one ever listens to the users.
|
| There's some obvious random word shuffling happening and
| that gave it away.
| thih9 wrote:
| I listened to what gave it away and it's definitely the
| same obvious random word shuffling. Imagine finding users
| who all have been listened to, but only partially and in
| the same way, perhaps with slight changes.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| I listened to what it gave away and it's definitely the
| same random obvious word shuffling. Imagine users finding
| who have all been listened to, but only partially in and
| the same way, perhaps slightly changed.
| grkvlt wrote:
| just like colossal cave [0] YOU ARE IN
| A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL DIFFERENT.
| YOU ARE IN A LITTLE MAZE OF TWISTING PASSAGES, ALL
| DIFFERENT.
|
| i remember getting lost in that maze, and didn't realise
| that the subtle change in wording for the room
| description was the trick to identifying them, so i
| dropped objects to help me make a map - which is what you
| are supposed to do in the _other_ maze
| YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE.
|
| 0. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
| lists all the different descriptions
| ehnto wrote:
| That was the web circa 2010, when people were still using
| spinbots and link wheels as an SEO technique. They were the
| same articles, but with occasional words swapped out so it
| wasn't duplicate content in the eyes of Google. The Panda
| update for Google was largely responsible for cutting down on
| that behavior.
|
| What's fascinating about natural language models for me, is
| that I assume it is already being applied to "spin" articles,
| and I imagine that is part of why Google kinda sucks to use
| right now.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| My account once got taken over by one of those hackers that will
| play the same song over and over to boost its rating
|
| I mostly listen to metal, but one day I noticed that on my
| last.fm my most listened to track was suddenly "The 1975 -
| Chocolate". A song that I'd never heard before or since. The
| track was played at completely random times, often multiple times
| in a row or when I wasn't awake.
| petercooper wrote:
| I know it was a rhetorical question about how to produce such
| tracks en masse, but Sonic Pi would be reasonably good at this if
| you ever did want to algorithmically generate a ton of tracks
| using the same stems.
| matchagaucho wrote:
| Interesting that this Ghost Producer chose a polyrhythmic tuples
| over 4 meter. That's very difficult for the average listener to
| "find the one" downbeat.
|
| Wonder what the thought process was behind this. Less likely to
| skip the track while trying to find the groove? More monetization
| with the short length?
|
| https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2IaWgbhpPbS3Z9DYgf1rqg?si=...
| Danborg wrote:
| Look at the Peaceful Guitar editorial playlist on Spotify. (It's
| one of the biggest and most streamed in the world.) Every artist
| on there that doesn't have a Bio is a fake artist. Meaning
| Spotify owns the music. They populate their playlists with these
| artists they own and that way don't have to make royalty payments
| to them. It's very shady.
| pier25 wrote:
| It's like Amazon knowing what articles are selling more. So
| they start manufacturing and selling those themselves and
| removing the competition.
| nivenkos wrote:
| This doesn't make sense though - Spotify doesn't pay per stream
| (no-one does) but by a revenue share. So they would still pay
| out the same more or less - i.e. your premium subscription is
| put into a big pool and then divided out, it's not like your
| individual subscription goes to what you listened to.
|
| I guess it could help shift some streams to indie artists with
| a less favourable contract compared to the big 4 record
| companies, but it hardly seems worthwhile?
| dublinben wrote:
| The less 'real' music you listen to, the fewer royalties that
| Spotify has to pay to the record labels. If you're listening
| to more 'fake' music, then this saves Spotify money, and
| increases their profit margins. This is the exact same
| incentive behind their push into podcasts, another kind of
| audio content they don't have to pay royalties on. In this
| case, either because it's shared freely, or because they've
| acquired the original publisher themselves, e.g. Gimlet
| Media, Parcast and The Ringer.
| honkdaddy wrote:
| This is crazy. Every single one I looked at was like this. Are
| these even real people playing guitar? If it were piano I'd say
| it's 100% just MIDI arrangements.
|
| I'm gonna look into this more. I have friends trying to break
| into the industry and gaming the Spotify and TikTok algorithms
| is (unfortunately) a big part of that these days. Having fake,
| phantom artists filling up your flagship playlists is so anti-
| creator I'm truly appalled at Spotify.
|
| https://open.spotify.com/artist/2wdHPx6lvGu3MvTH61uvTi?si=3n...
| balentio wrote:
| Fever dreams are easy to come by.
| caseyross wrote:
| 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
| natural progression here.
|
| Regarding the broader pop music industry, a "GPT-3 for music"
| would likely further inequalize the relative power of labels and
| musicians. If people who control music distribution can easily
| make hit songs without needing to hire songwriters, arrangers, or
| performers, they surely will do so. I can imagine a lot of music-
| related occupations potentially having to pivot to rely _much_
| more heavily on live performances to make any money.
| zone411 wrote:
| Yes, it's inevitable. Some parts of this process are harder
| than than others, though. I think I've handled the hardest
| part, which is making catchy melodies (https://www.youtube.com/
| playlist?list=PLoCzMRqh5SkFwkumE578Y...). Live music is already
| over 50% of music industry revenue, so the transition could be
| a bit easier for musicians than for visual artists.
| djmips wrote:
| Didn't find the melodies catchy. Sorry to tell you that.
| _bohm wrote:
| In fairness, I'd bet that most of your favorite tunes would
| become very un-catchy if they were stripped of harmony and
| percussion, and played by a quantized, expressionless
| square wave
| projektfu wrote:
| The melody style reminds me of a songbook I have of Tin Pan
| Alley songs.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Considering that significant portion of the pop music produced
| in the last 30 years is made by a few people like Max Martin,
| one can assume that there's a formula for writing music that
| people love. Seems promising for AI to be honest.
| usefulcat wrote:
| Generated music has been around for at least several years, for
| example https://generative.fm/ (no affiliation).
| femto113 wrote:
| AI that imitates well-known composers goes back much further,
| I remember attending a concert of "virtual mozart" works at
| UC Santa Cruz back in the late 80s/early 90s
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jul/11/david-
| cop...
| vibrolax wrote:
| In Orwell's "1984", a machine called the Versificator generated
| the music and literature for consumption by the proles.
| eteos wrote:
| I think music, especially pop music, is in a completely
| different ball park than text or images. An AI can't just make
| a catchy song only with a training model and some rules.
| Successful musicians have a feel for what we will like and what
| will be trendy. An AI can't do that, at least not for a while
| to come. Well, thats just my thoughts, I'm not an expert on
| this.
| IMSAI8080 wrote:
| OpenAI (the people behind GPT-3) already make one. It's called
| JukeBox. It can even make new unique songs in the style of
| existing artists with a simulation of their vocal style.
|
| https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/
| feydaykyn wrote:
| That's the plot of Norman Spinrad's book Little heroes. It
| starts with the idea that Music record companies can only make
| bad automated music, and in order to make a hit, they hire real
| musicians.
|
| It's a great read!
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/719900.Little_Heroes?ref...
| ehnto wrote:
| Music can be algorithmically generated since it's formulaic,
| what I think machine learning models will struggle with at
| first is maintaining those formulas throughout a song. I
| imagine AI produced songs will/do sound winding and unhinged at
| first. All the right ingredients but stewed up in a pot.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Like Dall-E. What you'll get is music which apes music tropes
| really well, but strangely intentionless and disassociated.
| For genres like ambient where the intention is to be
| intentionless and disassociated (or can be), the result is
| like 'oh hey, AI is here!'.
|
| It's weird. You could extrude endless amounts of The
| Caretaker, "Everywhere At The End Of Time" if you specified
| the recipe, with a 'deterioration dial' and some coding to
| determine how you vary the output. But you'd be free-riding
| on a pre-existing artistic intention that was originally
| implemented in dramatic, bold manner. To extrude endless
| amounts of this stuff is both fairly trivial and missing the
| point completely...
| duped wrote:
| 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.
| Kiro wrote:
| Your comment ignores 99% of genres.
| ehnto wrote:
| I don't think it does, if you are alluding to electronic
| music that's also just as much about the human aspect of
| it. Lets be real, at the commercial end of the spectrum
| electronic music is trivial to make, but no one wants to
| hear "Song seed 2aslk3j25lh" they want to hear what their
| "Music Hero" has made. Another aspect is DJing, DJs don't
| even pretend to have made the music yet people will come
| out just to hear a specific DJ play other peoples songs.
| It's almost entirely about the human figurehead, the
| popularity contest, the status and the fashion of it all.
|
| Some labels might try to present artists that have AI
| music, and no doubt it would still be consumed. But it's a
| huge risk when it to the human aspect of it as people want
| authenticity.
|
| Music is consumed in a huge array of contexts though, where
| I think AI music will end up is as music in movies, backing
| tracks in adverts and youtube videos, as filler music for
| all kinds of other media.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| Let's be realistic here. Hatsune Miku was created before
| 2010. While I dislike the genre, they've completely sold
| out all tickets to these festivals where "she"
| "performed".
|
| You're really not thinking it through if you think _any_
| genre isn 't going to fundamentally change once the
| industry starts to push virtual artists. They can be
| perfect and relatable to teenagers. You really don't need
| physical people to pull off a good festival, a well
| orchestrated 3d avatar is likely even better because they
| can be _bigger_ and seen from the back
| ehnto wrote:
| Hatsune Miku kind of helps my argument here, because they
| still needed a personified identity for the music even
| though none of it's real. So then we ask, if Hatsune Miku
| could be manifested into the real world, do you not think
| their fans would be absolutely ecstatic? Behold, humans,
| the solution to that problem.
|
| I know it's possible to get some people excited about an
| avatar, but I'm going to argue that the vast majority of
| people would prefer humans for as long as they can get
| them.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| You might want to check out a Hatsune Miku concert on
| YouTube because humans are actually entirely redundant if
| you can just _generate_ the song. (You 'll probably want
| to mute the audio though, otherwise your ears might start
| to bleed)
|
| There is a 3d avatar dancing on the floor. The
| holographic technology in the context of concerts is
| incredible at this point.
|
| As a matter of fact, its likely going to be in favour of
| AI if you consider VR headset etc, as the coming
| generations will be able to _interact_ with the virtual
| artists, giving the producer am even easier time to get
| money from the consumers.
|
| I'm not looking forward to that future to be honest.
|
| Example: https://youtu.be/PlQIdq5mv_k
|
| /Edit: After thinking about it some more: I think I agree
| that the potential music generation isn't going to change
| anything by itself. It's just another building block that
| will enable the music industry to eventually remove real
| humans from the equation. while we're slowly progressing
| on that path, the music generation alone won't push us to
| the logical conclusion.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| Generated music but with dance troupes? Ala K-Pop?
| sprite wrote:
| Capital Records just signed an AI rapper:
| https://www.xxlmag.com/fn-meka-virtual-rapper-signs-major-la...
| thinkpad13 wrote:
| is this just like what they have done to google ads algorithm or
| youtube algorithm right?
| bambax wrote:
| > _I've collected these tracks in a playlist so you can listen
| for yourself_
|
| Plot twist: the author of TFA also made the tracks.
| vintermann wrote:
| Unlikely. The spammer probably does not want this kind of
| attention.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| The new dystopia we created is uncanny valley all the way down
| isn't it?
| thn-gap wrote:
| I think about these kind of activities and their motivations a
| lot.
|
| Money is too valuable and rewarding that many people will
| constantly chase these hustle practices no matter the ethical
| implications or if they are shady. Even more so if they are
| legal.
|
| With the current potential of AI and automation this just makes
| the resulting impact bigger for the 'good citizen consumer', like
| the sheet amount of autogenerated videos on YouTube that just
| read out loud some scrapped content, or even the stolen and
| reposted content, all in seek of finding a semiautomatic money
| cow that they can milk. After all, if that can give you easy
| scalable money, why not trying?
|
| The bad part is that now consumers have to deal with a polluted
| search result and recommendations list, that is really hard to
| filter by the media owners because its a tough issue.
|
| I understand the motivations, but I hate that the product
| degrades the quality as a result of a few actors .
|
| Sometimes I wonder if this will always be the status quo in our
| world and I'm actually missing out on joining these practices as
| well and see if I can hit some jackpot, but I hate these side
| hustle practices.
| spyrefused wrote:
| I am very curious about the author's comments on whether all
| these variations have been made automatically.
|
| I think that with a standard Ablenton project, for example, with
| several VSTs (this sounds like a Kontakt library) and replacing
| the midi clips by the Magenta's MusicVAE output for example, you
| could make infinite variations.
| [deleted]
| danjudgemusic wrote:
| As a producer, I feel like this could be more related to people
| using Splice and other popular sample packs in order to just get
| something uploaded onto Spotify? I've come across a lot of very
| similar tracks on Spotify which utilise all the same sounds from
| the same sample packs and they're almost identical.
| plaff wrote:
| Do you have any examples? I'd like to take a peek.
| O__________O wrote:
| Related news stories:
|
| - A Bulgarian scheme scammed Spotify for $1 million--without
| breaking a single law
|
| https://qz.com/1212330/a-bulgarian-scheme-scammed-spotify-fo...
|
| - The Rise Of Spotify Streaming Farms: How Fraudsters Are Cashing
| In
|
| https://lunio.ai/blog/ad-fraud/spotify-streaming-farms/
|
| - When Spotify, Pandora, and iTunes Pay Royalties, This Is Where
| the Money Goes
|
| https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2013/07/03/breakdown/
| hokkos wrote:
| So I played a few of those song into shazam and it gave me others
| similar songs :
|
| https://open.spotify.com/track/35lnhh0LCDZOu10Lasv6bi?si=257...
|
| and lots of others that were not on spotify :
|
| Boss Through the Author by MemethSoyal
|
| Ariya Saunders by Raphy Fraser
|
| So it means it is possible to catch them, and spotify is probably
| actively trying to remove them.
| ford wrote:
| This feels like the Spotify version of the websites you find on
| Google that just scrape Stack Overflow
|
| As Spotify's recommendations become more ingrained in how people
| listen to music they'll have to think about how to treat "song
| spam"
| wohfab wrote:
| I recently discovered YouTube videos that use a crappy spoken
| intro with a real human face in it and then proceed to display
| scraped StackOverflow answers as text with music in the
| background. the intro/outro is always the same as it is very
| generic.
|
| Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HElG3iLn6Kk
| zebracanevra wrote:
| Oh yes, there are many of those. Here's another example:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=219t6qwOWYk
| vintermann wrote:
| Oh, they have been aware of it for a long time.
|
| https://blog.echonest.com/post/48943428838/how-we-cope-with-...
|
| Spotify is actually half-decent here. The other streaming
| services seem to mainly compete on cutting costs, and many are
| little more than frontends over 7digital's services (who,
| surprise, also do virtually nothing to prevent spam).
|
| To take an example:
|
| https://www.deezer.com/search/%22From%20the%20box%22/album
|
| That particular spammer has been doing this thing for years.
| He's easily recognizable: one characteristic is the way he uses
| colour filters. If you search qobuz (one of these terrible
| front-end streaming services which does no QQ) for the label
| "piano to go", and say, the album "Joker Games", you'll notice
| it's uploaded once for Bill Haley, and once for Bill Haley &
| his Comets. That was apparently close enough to be detected as
| a duplicate, so he put a blue image filter on the latter.
|
| Most of this guy's albums eventually get deleted (or delisted),
| even on sites like Qobuz - probably more for lack of plays than
| for being detected as spam, I'd bet. So you don't get his full
| history. But I found out the French library service made some
| effort to catalogue streaming releases a while back, and with
| access to search in those, you can track his evolution. He was
| a lot sloppier in the past, for instance he didn't bother to
| come up with a new label name for every dump. But he's been at
| it since at least 2015.
| bpye wrote:
| I guess Apple have some sort of curation, or maybe don't use
| 7digital at all, because Apple Music shows no results for
| "From the box".
| vintermann wrote:
| Yeah. I haven't used them, but Apple Music too seems to
| have blocked this spammer. Google (YouTube music now) too.
|
| Tidal still has him, though:
| https://tidal.com/browse/album/241125359
| mkl95 wrote:
| Song spam does not seem to be endemic yet, but there are tons
| of low quality covers. Many classic rock songs have a couple of
| decent covers and half a dozen abysmal ones.
| olivertaylor wrote:
| Related: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/an-mbw-reader-
| just-bl...
| hedora wrote:
| > _Recently, Spotify announced their Discovery Mode program.
| This allows labels to discount selected parts of their catalog
| in return for increased promotion via Radio and Autoplay_
|
| Uggh. I wish payola were actually illegal in practice.
|
| > _So who's really losing in this equation?
|
| Possibly, older out of touch-artists who think music should
| always be something meaningful and "culturally important" and
| are perhaps - just slightly - butthurt that no one cares, or
| that other people have figured out another way to be
| successful._
|
| I can't tell if this bit is dripping with sarcasm, or if the
| author is actually this contemptuous of musicians and this
| dismissive of the difficulty associated with getting
| "discovered" these days.
|
| Either way, it is a fascinating article. Wouldn't have guessed
| that Sony was one of the leading spammers/fraudsters (see other
| threads on this article) in this space, or that Spotify was
| complicit.
|
| This actually makes me angrier than the Sony rootkit fiasco.
|
| Thanks for the link.
| olivertaylor wrote:
| Personally, I think it's sarcasm.
|
| I found it totally fascinating myself. And now that I've read
| it I see the effects everywhere (musically).
| rockostrich wrote:
| Seems like most of the discussion here is focused on everyone's
| own experience with this, but can I just recommend Robin Sloan as
| a human in general for folks to follow in their lives?
|
| His 2 novels, "Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore" and "Sourdough",
| are both really engaging reads. His 3rd novel is in progress and
| it seems like it's going to be more of the same quality. He also
| has a couple of novellas and a bunch of great short stories (some
| of which he did limited printings of and mailed out and one of
| which was procedurally generated and unique to the person who
| purchased it).
|
| His newsletter is constantly filled with great media
| recommendations and he's always working on something interesting
| in that bridges the media and tech worlds.
|
| He also makes great olive oil (Fat Gold).
| avg_dev wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation. It is nice to see. I have read
| both of the novels myself, as well as at least one of the
| Penumbra novellas (it's been a while). I really enjoyed the
| Penumbra stuff; I have to admit I remember feeling slightly
| unsatisfied with the conclusion but I was definitely hooked and
| kept turning the pages and it was the first time I had seen a
| fictional book refer to Ruby programming. I really enjoyed his
| characters. I recall enjoying Sourdough as well, perhaps not as
| much as Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore, but that was an
| absolute pageturner for me so it's hard to compete with.
|
| I am subscribed to his newsletter but I confess I rarely if
| ever read it. After having read this post and your comment,
| I'll make an effort to give it a solid look.
|
| Festina lente!
| qprofyeh wrote:
| Naming is universally difficult. Make it a numbers game.
| usednet wrote:
| 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. At this point
| there are so many of these fake profiles and songs that the
| music, which is simple "mood music" normally (which happens to be
| easy to make), is appearing on real playlists and being
| recommended to real listeners.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| I worked in music distribution and maintain a very active
| interest in this space. This is actually fairly unlikely to
| work, from three different standpoints: operational logistics
| of how money moves around; technical logistics; and economics.
|
| I'm not saying that it never works - and I'm not saying that
| this was not happening in the past (in fact, it almost
| certainly was) but the chances of it happening today are really
| pretty low.
|
| Here's why - and I'll also talk about what is more likely to be
| the reason for these tracks.
|
| 1. Operational Logistics
|
| Although streaming activity is reported in real time Spotify
| accounts usage to labels and distributors in the middle of the
| month following the month in question. The label/distributor
| then invoices and receives payment. Depending on the deal the
| label or distributor has with Spotify they will be paid on a
| defined cycle. This may well be NET 30 EOM - meaning that when
| the distributor raises the invoice it will be paid 30 days
| after the end of the month in which it was raised.
|
| 2. Technical logistics
|
| Both Spotify and distributors identify and flag unusual
| streaming activity. If you bot 1 million fraudulent streams
| this activity may well be removed in between the streams
| happening and payment being made. If a distributor sees sudden
| spikes in activity they may well hold payment until they can
| identify whether or not the streams are genuine.
|
| Streaming fraud is a hot topic - and it's obviously fairly easy
| to identify "non-human" activity when you have end to end
| control of the streaming platform.
|
| Spotify has historically significantly reduced play count on
| tracks they think are botted: today I'd be surprised if many
| botted streams are even counted against tracks.
|
| 3. Economics
|
| Essentially this is an arbitrage situation - can you get enough
| streams to drive more revenue than the amount you are paying
| for the fake streams?
|
| The answer is almost certainly no.
|
| Let's say you've got 1000 accounts that are going to be your
| bot farm. There's a lot of work is going to have to go into
| getting those accounts to stream in a human-like way.
|
| Because Spotify does not have a user centric royalty model
| (where the subscription payments of a user go proportionately
| to the artists they stream) there is no fixed "amount per
| stream" - only broad indicators.
|
| Streams from premium accounts pay a far higher rate than
| streams from ad supported accounts.
|
| Roughly speaking a million premium streams is going to bring
| you somewhere in the region of $4000-5000 dollars.
|
| If your bot farm is 1000 premium accounts then that's costing
| you $10,000 a month. You're going to have to have a certain
| amount of hardware - or hardware emulation - as if the streams
| on a certain track are all coming from web, and from the same
| network, that's much more likely to flag than streams
| distributed across web, Spotify desktop app and Spotify mobile.
|
| Now, sure, you can pay someone who already has the bot farm -
| but there are then three risks: first of all, that they take
| your money and run; second, that their bot farm gets flagged
| and the streams don't pay through; third that Spotify doesn't
| pay out on the streams.
|
| So assuming that you've set up your own bot farm investing in
| 500 cheap android phones and doing the rest with emulation
| there's a lot of cost - at least $10,000 a month.
|
| Can you drive 5m streams a month? Well, each node in your bot
| farm would need to stream the track 5000 times a month. Is that
| going to look strange? For sure.
|
| There's also the question of finding distributors who are going
| to pay out easily and quickly if you can even convert the
| fraudulent streams to cash.
|
| What is actually happening here? Well, mood music - ambient
| music, ambient electronic - is a really important part of the
| "make music happen" sell of Spotify. A lot of people don't want
| to hear the hits. They want music to play while they work or
| run or cook or have a shower. And for these kinds of "activity
| driven" or "event driven" music it's important that the flow of
| a curated playlist works.
|
| You might have ten great tracks by known artists, but the
| transition between those tracks doesn't work. Spotify has
| (according to media) begun commissioning songwriters to write
| these "filler" or "transitional" tracks. There was a huge
| tabloid storm whipped up about this by a music journalist some
| time back who said he'd unveiled a whole stable of "fake
| artists". Spotify wants people to keep listening to music. I
| suspect - but have no direct insight into this - that people
| who listen to a lot of ambient playlists are particularly
| valuable subscribers - they will almost certainly be paying (as
| you don't want your flow interrupted by ads) and they will
| almost certainly be over indexing against usage. They are
| probably also less likely to churn because of the lock in of
| saved playlists etc. It's also quite likely that a lot of these
| custom transitional tracks are not available on other platforms
| so you may not even be able to replicate a saved playlist.
| dustinmoris wrote:
| How is this money laundering? If you use dirty money to sign up
| to Spotify and listen to specific songs so that you get some of
| the money "clean" back wouldn't that in case of Spotify be the
| dumbest and most inefficient way of laundering in the history
| of money laundering? I mean doesn't Spotify keep the majority
| so you're essentially donating dirty money into the stock price
| of Spotify for the most part, no?
| scatters wrote:
| Spotify supposedly pays around 70% of subscription and
| advertising revenue to labels and rights holders. Since
| payments are not pro rata per listener but are aggregated
| over all listens, if your fake customer streams more than the
| average you could quite possibly make an actual profit from
| this technique.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| You pay for robots and stolen accounts, you got money per
| listens.
|
| Spotify doesn't really get your money at any point. The bots
| don't need to be Spotify Premium.
| yesbabyyes wrote:
| Not necessarily. Let's say you get a burner phone and hook it
| up at home. You need internet and electricity of course.
|
| Buy a Spotify gift card for $10 USD cash, use that to get
| Spotify Premium (first use the three months free of course).
|
| Play your (artists') songs, 30 seconds each (considered one
| stream by Spotify). That's 2880 streams per hour, 86400
| streams per month.
|
| Spotify pays around $2-$4 USD per 1000 streams, so that's
| ~170-340 USD clean money coming in. Some of that goes to
| Amuse/TuneCore/etc. Then music production, admin, etc. But
| there seems to be quite some money to be made, especially
| once you manage to fake your way into recommendations and get
| legit streams as well.
| dustinmoris wrote:
| Who launders pocket money? Anything less than hundreds of
| thousands of dollars is just not worth laundering. Nobody
| is going to ask you where you got a few 10k from.
| raunak wrote:
| Sorry, but wow you got this wrong. I'm not sure if it was
| just a guess or something, but look at the comment below
| for what it actually is. The money laundering is in the
| form of purchasing botted streams.
| yesbabyyes wrote:
| As another comment [0] suggests, this is common at least
| in Sweden. I have it on first hand that a successful
| local rapper has the whole apartment full of phones
| streaming his songs. Floor, shelves, sofa, all full of
| phones.
|
| I'm sure mixing it with bot traffic is also popular. I
| also assume that Spotify (et al) are more successful in
| filtering out bot traffic from central Asia than legit
| phones in the middle of the target group.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32560737
| winternett wrote:
| I think I came across a YouTube video a while back that said
| even the platform was sponsoring fake artist accounts to
| recoup/claim streaming royalty payments.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCAPll9A5F8
|
| After years of grinding to break ground on spotify and seeing
| the names they promote taking the lion share of revenue it
| becomes very apparent that it's a cash grab that just can't be
| trusted. There are literally dozens of other sites that do the
| exact same schemes and only pay out a fraction of the revenue
| they rake in for doing little to nothing for artist and music
| discovery.
|
| The social Internet just seems more scammy than ever, and
| that's why I keep most of my music work offline until it gets
| worked into a project. Eventually there will be a correction
| hopefully, but the vast amount of free/unrewarded work that is
| being hustled out of people from these sites is not
| sustainable, and eventually it will turn into a content creator
| drought/strike if it goes unchecked too long.
| lupire wrote:
| jan_pike wrote:
| That...Makes a lot of sense, now that I think about it. I guess
| it wasn't really apparent to me before it came to my attention
| like this, but making online content and artificially boosting
| it, so you can blend your funds within what you've obtained
| from ad revenue is so simple, yet so brilliant.
|
| Makes you wonder what other media out there might be laundering
| schemes, too...
| netsharc wrote:
| There is a shitton of crap movies in Hollywood. I wonder...
|
| Of course Hollywood accounting is already "This movie took
| $100 million at the box office, we spent $98 million on
| 'marketing', using our own internal marketing company.".
|
| I guess making crap Hollywood movies loses you money rather
| than laundering it...
| objclxt wrote:
| > There is a shitton of crap movies in Hollywood. I
| wonder...
|
| The movie doesn't need to be crap to be a product of money
| laundering! The Wolf of Wall Street[1] was infamously
| funded by money laundering (from the Malaysian Sovereign
| Wealth Fund),
|
| [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wolf_of_Wall_Street_(
| 2013_...
| [deleted]
| djmips wrote:
| Wow that's a rabbit hole!
|
| https://www.theedgemarkets.com/article/prosecution-tells-
| jur...
| unethical_ban wrote:
| That site screams "malware delivery" or spam at the
| least.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > That site screams "malware delivery" or spam at the
| least.
|
| I was intrigued since I recall the 1MDB scam, but didn't
| know all the details about it so I archived it [0].
|
| 0: https://archive.ph/HuEbS
| vishnugupta wrote:
| This happens in almost every company that acts as intermediary
| between buyers and sellers, I.e., a marketplace.
|
| Uber had (still has?) similar challenge where fake drivers were
| created, who took fake rides to liquidate stolen credit cards.
| ogrisel wrote:
| There is a similar problem with the YouTube recsys on cheaply
| generated videos (e.g. a physics + 3d rendering model to
| generate colorful videos of Spiderman and Batman driving
| colliding cars).
|
| See this older piece by Natasha Lomas on Tech Crunch:
|
| I watched 1,000 hours of YouTube Kids' content and this is what
| happened... http://tcrn.ch/2iPXpIA
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| Somewhat similar, I'm not really a tik-tok-fan, but after
| watching a LinusTechTips video with "KallMeKris" I was hooked
| on her content (one woman plays like 20 characters, yea yea
| judge me later :P ).
|
| Anywhoo I was surprised to find close to 20 Youtube accounts
| that only has like stitched-together 1 hour videos of all her
| content. With non a none negligible view count.
| lizardactivist wrote:
| How do the scammers get the money if they use someone else's
| (stolen) identity and bank account?
|
| Also, how do they succeed in keeping this scheme for more than
| a few days after the identity theft is noticed and reported to
| the police?
|
| And why would they not just take the very music they just
| bought and paid for, and publish that as any other artist do?
| There's no crime in buying the rights from another artist --
| that's exactly what all music labels do.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > How do the scammers get the money if they use someone
| else's (stolen) identity and bank account?
|
| Because if you have a stolen identity and open a bank
| account, as long as that account isn't trying to defraud the
| bank (e.g. write bad checks, commit ACH fraud), it can go on
| living for a long time before it's discovered and closed.
|
| In this case, they opened up a bank account with stolen
| identity, and then used that to get their Spotify payouts,
| and then eventually transferred that to another account
| (cash, crypto, whatever). From that bank's perspective,
| unless they were specifically informed of the bad account,
| there wouldn't be a ton of unusual activity that would flag
| the account.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| My take was that it's about getting _some_ of the dirty money
| out. So the dirty cash they are spending to fund this
| campaign is returning some % worth of Spotify commission.
| Even better if it somehow hooks the algorithm to recommend it
| to non-botted accounts.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Also, how do they succeed in keeping this scheme for more
| than a few days after the identity theft is noticed and
| reported to the police?
|
| Why would a stolen identity not being used to steal from the
| person whose identity was stolen, but just to process legal
| payments, be noticed in a few days? Or even a few years?
| Maybe at some point the IRS might find the account that used
| my identity and send me an angry letter, but that seems like
| it would be years down the line.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| See also Twitch streamers, Amazon listings with weird pricing,
| etc. Give someone poor dirty cash, let them set up accounts and
| buy/subscribe. You lose a percentage but you get clean money.
| vinay_ys wrote:
| The scam part here is that listen traffic is bot-generated?
| Irrespective of that, on the payout side, why do you need
| stolen identities? It is Spotify paying out legitimately, isn't
| it?
| thehappypm wrote:
| I don't doubt that people are using Spotify to launder money,
| but I really don't think this is particular method is a viable
| approach. It would be a much better business model if you could
| buy off iTunes or something, where are you know that most of
| the money is actually going to the recipient.
| hedora wrote:
| Interestingly, searching for Danni Richardson on Tidal yields
| the following apparently real artists:
|
| Deanie Richardson
|
| Danny Richardson
|
| Dani Richardson
|
| So, they are typo-squatting as part of the scheme.
|
| I asssume money laundering would work by setting up Spotify
| accounts with stolen money (that they used to buy gift cards?),
| then streaming the fake songs.
|
| Does spotify pay artists differently for paid vs free accounts?
| If not, then presumably they use free accounts for the bots, so
| it isn't really money laundering.
|
| I guess if you get some streams from real people, then using
| paid bot accounts might still be a reasonably cash efficient
| form of money laundering.
| vintermann wrote:
| Don't assume they're just targeting Spotify. Spotify is (or
| used to be) the best at catching algorithmic spam, the other
| streaming services hardly care at all.
|
| Likely they use a front service such as TuneCore which gives
| them access to all the streaming services. Just using Spotify
| is unnecessary risky if the goal is simply money laundering.
|
| (However, if the goal is to do pick up some royalties from
| all those background plays, and I think that's more common,
| then Spotify is clearly better)
|
| For an example of spam/fraud, look up the album "Angry man"
| on Deezer. Or rather, the albums. There are 200+ of them, all
| with the same stock image album art. That spammer is easily
| recognizable, he's been doing a similar bulk upload several
| times per month for maybe 10 years now. He's an example of a
| spammer who is present on very many streaming services.
| Spotify has kicked him off, though.
| vintermann wrote:
| The spammer is still at it, I see:
|
| https://www.deezer.com/search/%22From%20the%20box%22/album
| exikyut wrote:
| FWIW this is all I see, not logged in (never had an
| account), from AU: https://imgur.com/a/HXpn9JG
|
| Not sure if I'm seeing something different to you...?
| vintermann wrote:
| Yes. I see a screen full of your second to last result:
|
| https://twitter.com/HaraldKml/status/1562137336409985025/
| pho...
| amelius wrote:
| Doesn't it leave a money trail?
| vosper wrote:
| Is it money laundering in that "dirty" money pays for the bots
| that rack up the streams, which generates "clean" money paid
| from Spotify to the fake artist?
| williamscales wrote:
| Yep, exactly
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| ok so the problem for the money launderer is that as
| spotify gets better at detecting bots and spam accounts
| they will have to pay increasing amounts of dirty money to
| get out clean money, at what point does it become a losing
| proposition to them, that is to say when this form of money
| laundering is less efficient than older forms?
| coldtea wrote:
| A bigger problem would be that Spotify pays very little.
| And to have the bot "listen" to a song (to be eligible
| for payment) takes minutes of streaming, which turns to
| tons of time and a big bandwidth bill, since they'll need
| to do thousands of them in parallel...
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| it's obviously worthwhile for them now to do this, but
| sure it is an additional cost that at some point will
| make it not worth doing.
| dropofwill wrote:
| They wouldn't have to actually play the songs, could just
| use the offline listening reporting endpoints.
| webmobdev wrote:
| This is where malware run bots come into picture ... it
| solves a lot of problem like not having to pay for
| bandwidth, evading detection by distributing access to
| the songs among varied IP and geography, etc.
| IAmNotAFix wrote:
| What is the money efficiency of that?
| rexreed wrote:
| It's not about efficiency, it's about avoiding getting
| caught for criminal acts. Since criminals don't pay taxes
| on their earnings and don't have to pay for all sorts of
| things others do, they're already more "efficient"
| nightpool wrote:
| Sure, but if you're going through a distribution service
| that has a 60/40 split with Spotify, are you going to be
| okay with 40% of your laundered proceeds getting eaten by
| Spotify? How does that compare to other laundering
| opportunities? And that's not even counting the costs
| imposed by your distributer. For example, if you have
| 1,000 tracks, on TuneCore that's $10,000 dollars just for
| track distribution, as well as a $50 per-album yearly
| fee. It does seem somewhat inefficient, and very easy for
| Spotify to notice and crack down on. (But they don't have
| a lot of incentive to look too closely, since they're
| getting paid handsomely for it...)
| folkrav wrote:
| Diversification, I guess? Having multiple concurrent
| laundering streams, so if one dies, the rest can keep
| going?
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Like an airgap for money
| colechristensen wrote:
| I had my Spotify password compromised a while back and random
| fake generated music would play sometimes from my stereo. Very
| strange experience until I figured out what happened.
| nerdponx wrote:
| And now as far as we can tell there's a cottage industry built
| around algorithmically-appealing (and probably algorithmically-
| generated) mood music. What a weird outcome.
| kingofpandora wrote:
| I'm probably missing something but how is this money
| laundering?
| Ragnarokk wrote:
| (In my opinion) Some hacker provides a paid service in which
| you have either hacked spotify accounts or well generated
| fakes that can run streams on fake artists accounts. Some
| random mafia pays these hackers to maintain their bots and to
| launder their money. You can even pay the hackers with the
| finally laundered money.
| kingofpandora wrote:
| Now the hacker has to launder the money somehow. Fine, it's
| much less money, but still it doesn't feel like laundering
| rather than just straight up scamming.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| 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...
| INTPenis wrote:
| 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?
| VintageCool wrote:
| Who knows, maybe the bots even have legitimate Spotify
| listener accounts.
| DownGoat wrote:
| There are services that offer bots that increases your
| listening count on Spotify. People with dirty money
| create a bunch of artists and songs on Spotify, and use
| the services to increase the listening count. Spotify pay
| out royalties based on those numbers. So they pay the
| service with dirty money, and get clean money from
| Spotify
| hannasanarion wrote:
| You need some piece of hardware for the bot to do the
| streaming on so it sneaks past the spotify bot detectors,
| and you probably also want to pay for a premium account
| for each bot so that you get a bigger payout on the other
| side, since premium users generate bigger royalties.
|
| Making it expensive to operate an effective bot farm is
| part of the way that spotify tries to discourage botting.
| Spotify's bot detectors are good enough that it's not
| lucrative to just make a bunch of bots to give yourself
| streams for the free royalty money, but apparently not
| yet quite so good that it's not feasible to use bots to
| turn a large amount of dirty money into a lesser but
| still substantial amount of clean royalty money by way of
| funding a bot farm.
|
| Getting out, say, half of what you put in is a losing
| prospect for somebody who wants a money printer, but
| might be acceptable to a money launderer.
| beowulfey wrote:
| You need some kind of publisher/label to get on Spotify;
| an individual can't do it themselves (unless that's
| changed recently). There are labels that do this for a
| reasonable amount of money, Like $30-50/year or so.
| user_named wrote:
| The criminal gangs in Sweden are using Spotify to launder drug
| money buy buying streams on artists in their circle who they
| also to some extent control. One of those were just murdered
| last year.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| do you have a link or source for this story? (not sceptical,
| just curious)
| slac wrote:
| Here is an article in the Swedish equivalent of the
| financial Times. https://www.di.se/digital/expert-
| streamingtjanster-anvands-f...
| yrlihuan wrote:
| Very likely that the "musicians" that create those "music" are
| actually AIs.
| alliao wrote:
| hmm would this apply to steam as well? people buying up weird
| fake cards and on sell for less but cleaner money?
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| So the interesting bit is that there are hundreds of thousands
| or millions of Bot accounts streaming music on Spotify?
| Wouldn't this have massive implications for their Ad Revenue
| model?
| eadmund wrote:
| I wonder how much of the traditional music and theatre
| businesses has been money laundering. One could put out a
| record (which presumably has a nice margin on it) and pay folks
| a small amount of money to buy many many many copies of the
| records with cash, turning the dirty funds into clean ones.
| Likewise with a theatre production and ticket sales. Seems like
| any business with significant cash inputs would be vulnerable
| to this.
|
| And of course it would make it very difficult for legitimate
| businesses to survive: they would lack the implicit subsidy
| that the illegitimate businesses get.
| dylan604 wrote:
| By theater, what type of theater are you meaning? Stage
| performances like plays? If you put on a crap play, the
| critics will lambast it for the sham it is, and then no more
| ticket sales.
| user3939382 wrote:
| I used to work in the music industry and gaming the charts
| was common.
| notnaut wrote:
| Art and publishing too
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| 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 matter, you can get a new one.
| caf wrote:
| This is right - the whole point with money laundering is to
| have a legitimate business where extra money can come in,
| apparently from real but untraceable customers, that is
| really dirty money you control.
| 2000UltraDeluxe wrote:
| This. Same thing with Google Play apps and similar where you
| can get a clean payout and you can buy gift cards for cash.
|
| Back in the days, it was done with SMS payments and "party
| lines" with per-minute payments.
| thayne wrote:
| Isn't that what the parent described?
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| No, they suggested using stolen bank accounts to receive
| the artist royalties.
| afiori wrote:
| I think they meant "stolen identities and legitimate bank
| account opened by the stolen identity"
| mekkkkkk wrote:
| What you are saying is that the "artist" whose account the
| cleaned money goes to has to be in on it? I.e. no identity
| theft or bank account hijacking?
| i_love_limes wrote:
| This thread has quietened down now, so I'd like to ask about
| those forums you were talking about. I'm really curious about
| them and would love to have a closer look, but I completely
| understand if you don't want to divulge that kind of
| information.
| CincinnatiMan wrote:
| Is the idea that you spend dirty money on the bots in order to
| earn clean money on the fake artist accounts?
| mathattack wrote:
| And it's cheaper.
| nso wrote:
| Fascinating. It's so simple and makes so much sense, and
| replicable on any service that trades eyeballs (or ears in this
| case) for cash.
| bfgoodrich wrote:
| [deleted]
| nosianu wrote:
| That's really interesting - although when I read that story I
| thought the point was the broken recommendation system.
|
| Happens to me a lot on Youtube too - you watch just _one thing_
| - and now your recommendations are full of things like that
| _one thing_. Or Facebook /Youtube, somehow: I watched a single
| video on Youtube about Viking sword fighting and suddenly my
| people recommendations on Facebook were at least 20% militaria
| fans, always visible from the profile picture already. It
| finally stopped but it took well over half a year.
|
| That's why I thought this story was about recommendation
| systems recommending either only narrowly what you already
| know, and finding something new is not really well supported or
| not better than random, or that one outlier can skew your
| recommendations for a long time. Worst is there is no way to
| tell the system "stop recommending me this kind of stuff" at
| least for the second problem, no manual way to make adjustments
| for the user.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > Happens to me a lot on Youtube too - you watch just one
| thing - and now your recommendations are full of things like
| that one thing.
|
| I've heard reports of this happening but for well over a
| year, YouTube was still recommending relatively high quality
| videos to me that went along with my interests.
|
| Until last week.
|
| Somehow, somewhere along the line I must have clicked on some
| sort of "influencer" video. Now all I see are hundreds of
| hyper Minecraft videos, "I filled my house with 1 million
| packing peanuts" videos, etc. I have tried manually searching
| for some of the topics that interest me again, but these
| influencer-type videos still overrule whatever I try to
| manually teach it.
|
| I don't know what happened, but it has ruined it for me.
| fencepost wrote:
| You can review your history on YouTube and remove videos
| (or at least tell it to not use them for recommendations).
| You may find one obvious culprit a few weeks ago.
| coreyisthename wrote:
| It reminds me of stealing a cool car in GTA and then _every_
| car you see is that same model.
| merijnv wrote:
| > Happens to me a lot on Youtube too - you watch just one
| thing - and now your recommendations are full of things like
| that one thing.
|
| Spotify's recommendation system is _much_ better than youtube
| 's (at least for me). I frequently "joke" that it is one of
| the few applications of ML that actively make my life as a
| consumer better.
|
| Having been following Spotify's "Discover Weekly" for several
| years now, I'm actually really impressed how it manages to
| blend my long-term taste with recent moods. If I've been
| listening to one type of music for 1 or 2 weeks, there will
| be a noticeable uptick of it in the recommendations, while
| still mixing in less recent tastes.
| levoea wrote:
| I turned off youtube recommendations years ago so I can't
| comment on that, but spotify's have pretty much always been
| terrible in my experience.
|
| Anything suggested on the front page is either songs i
| already have in my liked songs or completely out of place.
| And the songs that i've already liked are from a few
| specific genres and artists, which seem completely random.
|
| A few examples:
|
| * Ratatat and Royksopp both are in my top 5 of all time
| according to Spotify's own stats, yet I never got any
| suggestion about E.VAX, Kunzite, or Royksopp's releases
| (their Lost Tapes playlist and their latest album, released
| about 4 months ago).
|
| * the 'recommended for today' section is regularly filled
| with random synthwave when it's a genre i barely ever
| listen to, and a lot of 'electronica/trance/organica/deep
| house/whatever you want to call it', which i don't really
| listen to either (at least this kind of electro music).
|
| * still, the worst offender has to be podcasts. I have zero
| interest in podcasts, have never clicked on any and likely
| never will, yet it's always the first thing on the app
| homepage, just below 'recently played'.
|
| I've tried to use the browsing categories but these are
| most of the time just as poor, they only contain a few
| playlists and the latest big releases of the genre.
|
| Highly subjective, but i'm tired of personalized
| suggestions & feeds. Just because I watched or listened to
| something does not mean I want more of it. And imho 'just
| use a no history session' or 'click not interested' do not
| solve the problem, especially since the argument in favor
| of recommendations seems to be that it is 'more convenient
| for the user'.
|
| Why can't I just browse instead? Spotify has a very
| extensive way of categorizing songs based on multiple
| characteristics
| (https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-
| api/referenc...), so why can't I just use that when
| searching for new music, directly in the normal app?
| srndsnd wrote:
| All these recommendation engine problems people aren't
| discussing here aren't bugs or problems, they're
| features. They're either pushing the content that makes
| people engage with the platform the longest, or that
| promote another feature that the platform is trying to
| push on you. With YouTube, it's MrBeast style videos,
| influencer bait, and shorts. With Spotify, it's for sure
| podcasts.
|
| Podcasts are so heavily pushed by Spotify because they're
| trying to make themselves the centralized one stop shop
| for your audio consumption. They didn't pay Joe Rogan
| millions for no reason.
|
| As a man under thirty, I see the JRE logo on the front
| page of my Spotify at least five or six times a month. I
| have no interest in listening to podcasts on Spotify. I
| very much dislike Joe Rogan. I hit the option to not
| request it to me again, and yet there it is.
|
| They're not recommendations based on your taste. They're
| a mix of just enough of your taste so that you trust and
| buy-in, mixed with whatever flavor of the week the
| recommendation engine would love to sell you.
| null_object wrote:
| > Spotify's recommendation system is much better than
| youtube's (at least for me). I frequently "joke" that it is
| one of the few applications of ML that actively make my
| life as a consumer better.
|
| I've had the opposite experience with Spotify - I'd say my
| discovery of new music has withered to almost nil since
| switching when Google Music shifted to YouTube.
|
| The algorithm just churns stuff I've already listened to,
| or suggests artists with (consistently) two songs that feel
| like Spotify's own fake artists - session musicians
| generated to capture royalties in-house.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| > Spotify's own fake artists - session musicians
| generated to capture royalties in-house.
|
| Is this something you have any references for? It sounds
| super interesting, like shadow kitchens for music.
| drewwwwww wrote:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xabb3/spotifys-fake-
| ambient... - from 2017, they have been up to it for a
| while
| __alexs wrote:
| I have the same problem with Spotify, just the same stuff
| over and over and over. YouTube Music has a much more
| diverse recommendation approach than Spotify does in my
| experience.
| soco wrote:
| True, but it makes for another good use: building a live
| playlist. Youtube would cram all random things with the
| couple of novel interesting clips, while Spotify will
| keep the mood until I decide to switch.
| [deleted]
| midasz wrote:
| As a father of a young child, Spotify's algo's are
| completely useless to me. If their ML is so smart it should
| be able to determine that Row row row your boat doesn't mix
| well with Anthrax. Wish I'd be able to toggle 'don't
| recommend kids music' somewhere.
| chewz wrote:
| Both Spotify and Apple Music algos have no idea about
| music mood vs time of the day vs activity. Like late
| evening before sleep being perhaps not a good moment for
| heavy metal. And running not a right time for slow
| classical music.
|
| Which is weird in case of Apple Music because Apple knows
| exactly if I am sleeping, running or driving a car - just
| from reading my watch.
| musictubes wrote:
| Google Play music had that feature. I really miss it.
| huffmsa wrote:
| What that really means is that they either:
|
| 1) aren't doing the sensor fusion we all think they are,
| out of inability to access the data.
|
| 2) the models (and therefore modelers) aren't good enough
| to use the data they have correctly.
| chillchilla wrote:
| Or 3) they run loads of A/B experiments to optimize
| engagement or some target metric and they've reached a
| local minima and are unable to escape it without a lot of
| political will or Product Managers willing to stick their
| necks out.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| Isn't that more just you thing though?
|
| Why isn't late evening before sleep good for heavy metal?
| I listen to the same music I listen to all day before
| sleep if I had music on.
|
| The music I listen too doesn't change no matter where I
| am or the time of the day.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >Both Spotify and Apple Music algos have no idea about
| music mood vs time of the day vs activity.
|
| You say that, but I attended a conference with Spotify-
| they are specifically working on that problem _now_.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| If they're working on it then the point still stands that
| they don't currently have it as part of their product.
|
| Time of day aware recommendations is something YouTube
| seems to have had for years. It always knows what to give
| me up top based on if I'm sitting down for dinner or
| lunch or if I'm looking for an audiobook for bed etc
| fersarr wrote:
| THIS! People have been asking for different listening
| profiles for ages. But they keep ignoring those feature
| requests in their community websites.
| pards wrote:
| Spotify has supported this for many years - it's called
| Spotify Premium Family[0]. You get 6 separate accounts
| for $16/mth. It is worth the price of admission just to
| keep my listening history / algo feed clean.
|
| [0]: https://www.spotify.com/us/family/
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| That sounds like a great argument for easy profile
| switching, along with an option in your play history for
| "move this play history item to this other profile".
| cycomanic wrote:
| Ha, my life exactly. Ever since my kids used my Spotify
| account to listen to music my discover weekly list has
| unbearable amounts of paw patrol, baby shark and others
| mixed in. Now to be fair it still puts in music that fits
| my taste as well (and often my kids also like that music
| too), and considering that this is one profile I don't
| know what it could do better.
| h2odragon wrote:
| dunno, "Indians" could probably be made to work with
| "row, row, row your boat" lyrics.
| depingus wrote:
| I feel like this could be easily solved by adding an
| "incognito mode" to the Spotify app.
| winternett wrote:
| A lot of the time it's not an algorithm in charge. Most
| of the time now recommendations are based on who paid to
| promote their song or podcast.
|
| Algorithms cannot be left running totally when sponsored
| ads can be purchased on the fly by content creators and
| musicians unless a site is lying to ad buyers about ad
| effectiveness.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| I'm trying to avoid this outcome by playing as many
| different genres other than "kids music" as possible to
| my baby. Probably won't know whether it worked for a few
| years but in the mean time I get to listen to real music.
| darkr wrote:
| Using the Spotify kids app is a solution to this problem.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > Row row row your boat doesn't mix well with Anthrax
|
| I'm not so sure about that. Have you heard Koian's Shoots
| and Ladders?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU2k-U2Ze0o
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Seems to be an unsolved problem to train the algorithms
| for recognizing different situations. One recommendation
| for all roles the user has. Though, thinking about, it's
| probably unsolvable as long as the interfaces remain
| simple and focused on satisfying only the one user, not
| the different roles, which would complicated the
| interfaces.
| ihaveajob wrote:
| It's fairly trivial to keep the recommendations
| consistent depending on the latest request, not just the
| logged user. Pandora does a good job at this. We have it
| on our Alexa and at dinner, we take turns with the kids
| requesting songs. If we stop requesting, it keeps playing
| an internally consistent series based on the latest song
| we asked for. So if it's the kids' choice, it's a never
| ending row of Kids Learning Tube :-)
| ZiiS wrote:
| I think this is fairly well solved from a mathematics
| point of view (high-school level k-means clustering). The
| unsolved bit is simply how we get the Spotify et al.
| product managers to care.
| schnable wrote:
| All they need to do is filter out content with genre=kids
| from recs. They could create a separate kids
| recommendation item if people actually want that.
| the_other wrote:
| This wont happen whilst they have family and kids'
| account types. Charge parents more for the premium option
| of not filling their carefully curated genre
| recommendations with nursery rhymes and Ed Sheeran.
| pelario wrote:
| Spotify is missing user profiles, in the Netflix fashion.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| From a technical point yes, but profiles are too rough
| and hard to use for this. What I mean is more some way to
| automatically maintain a kind of sub-profile, for each
| different aspect of a user, but exposed user-friendly and
| effortless. Most people won't maintain a separate user
| profile just for recommendations, as it's too much work
| for too little benefit.
| dominotw wrote:
| spotify is usually on people's personal device like a
| phone not on communal device at home like a TV.
| txtsd wrote:
| Speak for yourself. I use Spotify on my TV at home.
| Multiple people use it.
| dominotw wrote:
| rude response.
|
| i said 'usually' .
| fersarr wrote:
| People use it to play white noise for their babies which
| makes all the future song recommendations useless
| dotancohen wrote:
| It should be noted that in a Tesla, changing the Driver
| Profile (stores settings like seat and mirror positions)
| also changes the logged in Spotify account.
| mjmj wrote:
| I would consider Alexa a communal device. Spotify is
| heavily used there in households. Source: worked on
| Alexa.
| bradstewart wrote:
| I keep hearing this, but it hasn't happened to me yet. I
| wonder if it's because my Spotify history without kids is
| ~10 years vs ~2 years with?
|
| We listen to a lot of Disney music, etc in the living
| room on my account, but I've never had that type of thing
| show up in my Discover Weekly or any of the Daily Mix
| playlists.
|
| I will be very displeased if/when it does happen
| though.... Discover Weekly is a major reason I've paid
| Spotify for so long.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I used Spotify to play music at a children's party. I am
| still getting recommendations for "Happy Birthday" months
| later. According to Spotify, it goes very well with
| Sheryl Crow and R.E.M.
| kennend3 wrote:
| Almost every monday when the "discover weekly" is rebuilt
| i get new songs which are not in english.
|
| I have no non-english songs in any of my playlists and
| when they show up on discover weekly i flag them.
|
| I would think that recommending me Spanish/Russian music
| when my entire collection is english should flag a
| problem with the system?
|
| Yet week after week at least one song on discover weekly
| is in some foreign language.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I would argue for the vast majority of people language is
| not the primary indicator of what they consider good or
| bad music. I would assume it doesn't go into the
| algorithm at all and I certainly would not want it too. I
| have discovered some really cool music that I'm not even
| sure what language they are in this way.
| kennend3 wrote:
| I would wish you great success trying to frame an
| argument that the "vast majority" of people are not
| primary concerned with language.
|
| It is a bit hard to listen to/enjoy music when you cant
| understand a single word.
|
| Sure they had "gangnam style" but that was really a more
| a "one off".
|
| > I certainly would not want it too.
|
| I'd love to know if the majority feel this way.
|
| given there are countless articles such as this:
| https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/How-to-
| get-...
|
| i would think most find this annoying?
| 243423443 wrote:
| Why would you only listen to English songs?
| kennend3 wrote:
| i would think it would be obvious, but here goes -
| because i only speak/understand English?
| DrSiemer wrote:
| That's exactly why I enjoy listening to foreign pop
| music: I cannot hear how vapid the lyrics are.
|
| But besides that, great music does not need to spell it
| out to convey meaning and emotion.
|
| If the appreciation of a foreign song keeps growing, I
| will eventually look up a few translations. Their mixed
| interpretation usually only enhances an already enjoyable
| experience.
| macrolime wrote:
| For me the lyrics of songs are mostly irrelevant and it
| doesn't matter if I understand it or not. I usually don't
| pay attention to to it anyway.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Can be helpful to turn off watch history during such
| sessions, or to remove the videos from your history
| afterwards. Agreed that there should be an automated
| solution, but you can avoid it today will a small amount
| of work.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| Are we talking about the same Spotify? Because the only
| reference I found to removing songs from my
| recommendations is a thread from 2020 that says it is not
| possible.
|
| https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/How-do-I-
| delete-my...
| wartijn_ wrote:
| You can start a private session next time you have a
| birthday party, to prevent even more birthday songs being
| recommended.
|
| https://community.spotify.com/t5/FAQs/What-is-Private-
| Sessio...
| ihaveajob wrote:
| It sounds like a nightmare. Much like my YouTube
| suggestions, which now are mostly my kids' planet videos,
| and my wife's workout ones.
| schnable wrote:
| The easiest thing for them to do is simply exclude Kids
| music from their recs. Kids music doesn't benefit much
| from it anyway. Apple Music does this as do most video
| services.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I abandoned my account, partly for this reason. Too much
| kids music damaged it.
| WithinReason wrote:
| You can turn off monitoring what you listen to for
| recommendations by launching a "Private session" in the
| app
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| That's a good tip though I'm not sure that there is an
| option for it in the car when I most often get a request
| for nursery rhymes, or more recently Disney songs.
| bb101 wrote:
| I agree. There are some playlists and songs I only listen
| to in the gym, and similar songs constantly float to the
| top of Spotify's recommendations for me due to gym being
| 3x week.
|
| I did consider creating another "gym-only" user on our
| Family plan, but Spotify should really have a way to
| create named contexts for the one user. e.g. commute,
| gym, run, working from home, on a plane, etc.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Pandora does this with 'stations'.
| NIL8 wrote:
| There's a lot I like about Pandora and a lot I don't. The
| "stations" you mention can be pretty good. The problem I
| have is with the app itself. It's buggy and learning to
| use it well can be frustrating. A simple example would be
| when using the back arrow to return to where I was in the
| app. If I try to go back to a previous screen, it shrinks
| the app and when I resize it, Pandora restarts from
| scratch. This seems to take forever and it happens just
| about every time I use it. The only reason I haven't
| deleted it and switched to another app, is that I can't
| be bothered with all that while I'm working or driving
| (the only time I use it). Of course, there's other, more
| common issues like searching for a favourite song and
| only finding live sessions or worse, finding out they've
| stopped carrying a certain artist on my playlist.
| bombcar wrote:
| Hell, Spotify should use GPS tagging on your plays and
| determine "oh look, these songs are only played here, and
| always skipped elsewhere, hmmmm."
|
| But that is too complicated!
| tarentel wrote:
| I actually watched someone give a presentation at spotify
| on exactly this when I worked there. This was probably
| about 5 years or so ago. I have no idea what happened to
| that project. Probably the biggest issue would be getting
| people to give you location permissions but they also
| talked about working around that. It's a big org though
| they kill off ideas all the time.
| bombcar wrote:
| It seems easy enough to "sell" it to people listening.
| Location, speed based track selection.
| hakanensari wrote:
| Don't these end up in separate mixes, though? My 13 year
| old makes a lot of grime requests on road trips etc. and
| now I have a separate grime mix under my top mixes.
| mjmj wrote:
| They do, but recently my weekly discover is infused with
| kids songs. And it's taken a few weeks ok ignoring those
| tracks to get them out.
| midasz wrote:
| It does it relatively OK with the daily mixes, but daily
| drive and top of the year don't. That's why I don't
| really get it, they already know fairly well what kids
| music is so let me just toggle it off?
| 867-5309 wrote:
| driving to grime sounds like hell, that's parental
| dedication right there
| bombcar wrote:
| Can't be much worse than "Jenny" on loop for hours on
| end, heh.
| roywashere wrote:
| My brother who has young kids did the thing where you can
| make a combined playlist with me. He has indeed kids
| music littered all over in the shared playlist but
| moreover he also listened to a 100 track audio book on
| Spotify (which was not a great experience since it was
| published as an album and did not have bookmark support).
| The algorithm thought: oh he must REALLY like that album
| because he keeps on playing tracks from it, and so
| chapters from this book were also in our combined
| playlist
| adamauckland wrote:
| Can't really complain if they offer Spotify Family which
| gives you 6 separate premium accounts, I think it's only
| double the cost of a normal Spotify account.
| midasz wrote:
| So the solution is paying double so I can log out of my
| own account and into an account I created for my 2 year
| old so we can listen to a disney song? And when I want to
| listen to my own songs again then I have to log out of my
| kids account and back into my own?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Always those complaining customers ...
|
| (and I am back to caring for my own mp3 collection again
| and use spotify only for rare and new stuff)
| hakanensari wrote:
| That unfortunately doesn't solve it. There will always be
| moments where kids will want to ask for songs on your
| Spotify, like you're renting a car and have your phone
| hooked up.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Spotify's algorithm works really well until you let someone
| else use the account. I wish there was a "child mode",
| "party mode" or whatever to disable updating
| recommendations.
| duckmysick wrote:
| Perhaps Private listening is what you're looking for,
| assuming it's working as advertised.
|
| https://support.spotify.com/us/article/private-listening/
| dento wrote:
| There is. Called "private session" in the settings.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Oh ... today I learned. Awesome.
|
| It is cryptically called "hide activity" in my
| translation of Spotify.
| Janiya wrote:
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Pandora gives people granular access to the songs that
| are being used as the basis for recommendations. You
| would just delete the songs used by guests.
| fragmede wrote:
| It does. It's called "Private Session".
| nkozyra wrote:
| > Spotify's recommendation system is much better than
| youtube's (at least for me). I frequently "joke" that it is
| one of the few applications of ML that actively make my
| life as a consumer better.
|
| I hear this all the time but Spotify just plays stuff I've
| listened to. It's not a discovery service for me, it just
| plays the hits.
|
| I'm wondering if that's just what it is and everyone likes
| it because it's playing stuff they already like for twelve
| tracks and then one new song.
| type0 wrote:
| > It's not a discovery service for me
|
| Last.fm used to be good discovery service until it went
| downhill years ago, there should be services willing to
| take that niche
| gabereiser wrote:
| The YouTube recommendation engine seems to overweigh tangent
| content. For example. If your recommendations are all puppy
| videos (awww) and you go watch Jonathan Blow talk about why
| programmers aren't productive anymore, you'll get a whole new
| feed of "How to learn Rust in 100 seconds" crap.
| wldcordeiro wrote:
| The Youtube algorithm bothers me a lot because they have the
| subscribe system but as soon as you do subscribe to a channel
| that channel basically disappears off the
| recommendations/front page.
| whycombinetor wrote:
| Just opened youtube.com and 6/8 of the videos on the top
| section of my front page are from channels I'm subscribed
| to. That happens for me every time. Sorry your subscribe
| button doesn't work.
| folkrav wrote:
| I literally ignore the front page 99% of the time and just
| go to https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
| philsnow wrote:
| This is also the only way I can make sense of twitter,
| skip the 'feed' or whatever it's called[0] and go right
| to my curated lists.
|
| [0] as an aside, I only just made the connection that
| 'feed' is likely an abbreviation of 'newsfeed' but also
| brings a strong and stark connotation that I'm livestock
| to be fed
| folkrav wrote:
| Funny, maybe it's a language thing (French speaking) but
| to me the first thing that comes to mind when speaking
| about feeds is "RSS", so I genuinely never made the
| connection.
| thyrsus wrote:
| It probably is: English has "eat" vs. "feed", German has
| "essen" vs. "fressen", but duckduckgo.com translates both
| to French "manger".
| lubesGordi wrote:
| It's not a broken recommendation system, it IS the
| recommendation system.
|
| With respect to news, these systems are driving polarization
| in politics.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Spotify's recommendation system is so bad, that when I find a
| song I like, I put it into Pandora's free tier to find more
| songs. I hate how Spotify likes to prioritize every other
| song from that artist, and every other song from that genre,
| over songs from other artists and genres that sound similar
| to the song I want recommendations for. Pandora seems to
| prioritize the sound of the song, and actually finds similar
| songs.
| winternett wrote:
| Sites like Pandora, and many other "underdog" sites,
| operate as expected because they are trying desperately to
| please users in a bid to capture market share. Once they
| gain market dominance they begin to operate in an
| unexpected/unfavorable manner, just like Spotify does now,
| because "tailored" recommendations (strategic content
| recommendations) generates the most annual revenue for
| them.
|
| The saying "power corrupts" applies to this circumstance
| perfectly.
|
| Spotify manipulates recommendations to what makes them the
| most money, not necessarily what is best for user
| satisfaction. They do it just enough to prevent users from
| cancelling their subscriptions as well (usually).
| nix0n wrote:
| > Spotify manipulates recommendations to what makes them
| the most money, not necessarily what is best for user
| satisfaction.
|
| I was once a heavy user of Pandora, I am now a heavy user
| of Spotify, and I'm considering switching back. I think
| you're right.
|
| But, having experienced both services at the peak of
| their quality, I think "stronglikedan" is correct, that
| Pandora has a greater _ability_ (in addition to a greater
| desire) to analyze the way that music sounds.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| That's the worst, on top of youtube replaying the same
| track(s) you just listened to in the last 5-10 minutes in
| loop.
|
| One can only handle so much Cotton Eye Joe and Black Betty...
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Something I noticed after I watched an episode of Stoic
| Finance[1] about a possible "impending crash of the Chinese
| economy" is that YouTube started recommending about a dozen
| "independent" channels.
|
| I put the word independent in air quotes because they all
| have near-identical looking title cards with the similar
| fonts, some variant of the phrasing "The collapse has
| begun!", and the same-ish content. Different presenters,
| different channels, same message. Over and over. _And over._
|
| Reminds me of the "This is Extremely Dangerous to Our
| Democracy" clip that edited together dozens of apparently
| independent local news channels saying the same script,
| verbatim.[2]
|
| You've got to wonder if there's someone with deep pockets
| trying to influence public opinion on China? Or is it just
| the same thing as the "local" news channels, where a bunch of
| YouTubers have been "bought" by a corporation that send them
| material to read?
|
| I would love to know if anyone on Hacker News knows something
| about this kind of thing...
|
| [1] In case you're interested:
| https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=stoic+finance
|
| ...and some copy-cats clips I recommend opening in a private
| tab unless you want to be inundated with even more clones:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6slQLbT_fNY
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-tLenP5NA4
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDVNag9Pq7s
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JEdz1eA2vQ
|
| [2] Entertaining _and_ terrifying:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE
| astura wrote:
| >You've got to wonder if there's someone with deep pockets
| trying to influence public opinion on China? Or is it just
| the same thing as the "local" news channels, where a bunch
| of YouTubers have been "bought" by a corporation that send
| them material to read?
|
| These are the least likely options.
|
| The most likely case is that the channels are all copying
| each other. Even if they were all put out by a couple
| content farms, it's extremely unlikely that the content
| farms care about anything else but making money. The only
| thing they likely care about is that people watch videos
| like those.
|
| People trying to make easy money is, by far, more common on
| YouTube.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| The average Chinese person needs to save 100% of after-tax
| income for >30 years to have the down-payment for the
| average Chinese house. And, then, the interest payment
| alone would still be higher than the person's after-tax
| income.
|
| Either China has to indefinitely grow at 10%+ per year
| (it's becoming obvious that's not going to happen), or the
| Yuan or Chinese home prices (~50% of Chinese wealth) are
| _massively_ overvalued.
| philwelch wrote:
| It's probably just plagiarism.
| pachico wrote:
| Doesn't that imply to have millions of Spotify accounts to be
| used by the bots? Is that still profitable?
| lupire wrote:
| TomMasz wrote:
| You have to wonder about the economics of this scheme. The
| music probably isn't expensive to produce and clone, but
| Spotify pays so little per stream, how is it viable to purchase
| bot streams in large quantities?
| allochthon wrote:
| I am waiting for services to give up on purely algorithmic
| approaches and start exploring recommendations based on other
| users whose tastes the user likes. Even better if you could have
| different clusters of selected users for different occasions.
| Otek wrote:
| How will you know if user is a real person?
| coldtea wrote:
| The author seems to be suprised by this, not just founding it on
| Spotify, but the whole process. E.g.:
|
| "I love it, because it's so strange, so dizzying, and -- credit
| where due-because our mystery producer is truly going with the
| grain of the medium, in a way that no one merely "making albums"
| does, at all. What could be more 21st century, more "liquid
| modernity", than releasing your music as a haze of variations
| into the swirling currents of the algorithm?"
|
| But tons of artists have done the same in the past, whether in
| streaming platforms or in the vinyl and CD era. The most famous
| is probably Brian Eno who has made several albums using
| algorithmic generation.
|
| In general, algorithmic composition is a sizable niche, both in
| academy (tons of music PhDs on that), live performance, and
| recording settings. And yes, people release those things too.
|
| Even "generated content" to make bucks is a well known thing,
| both in music platforms like Spotify, in Amazon (tons of auto-
| generated Kindle books), and in YouTube
| (https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-
| in...).
|
| The strange thing is, the author should already have known all
| this, as his previous post goes:
|
| "My band The Cotton Modules, formed with the composer Jesse
| Solomon Clark, also goes with the grain of the 21st century: our
| process combines AI tools with human skill and imagination,
| metabolizing a huge archive of recorded music into something
| genuinely new and exciting."
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Both of those are bands making algorithmic music. This is
| algorithmically created bands with also music
| coldtea wrote:
| Not that big of a leap. A human also created the
| "algorithmically created bands", which is far easier than
| algorithmic music (they'd just register artists with
| random/generated names and some random choice of an image).
| dschuetz wrote:
| The same "discovery" happened to me half a year ago. Suddenly my
| queue contained just awful music at some point and I have googled
| the artists and found nothing. I decided to ditch Spotify
| altogether, because not only was I paying premium for _this shit_
| , but also it seems that Spotify doesn't really have the
| situation under control:
| https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/spotify-bot-takedowns-...
| maxehmookau wrote:
| How fascinating. I guess this opens the old question "What is
| music?"
|
| This is all definitely generated algorithmically using a really
| common chord progression in western music. (Think Pachebel's
| canon).
|
| So a person (or group of people?) is creating generatively
| created music that is designed to be as pleasing to the ear of a
| human so that Spotify ranks it higher in automatically generated
| playlists which means more plays, which means more money.
|
| It's crappy and spammy but also really kinda clever.
| michaericalribo wrote:
| And hey if it's pleasing to the ear do I even care?
| alexb_ wrote:
| All art is subjective, which of course makes detecting funny
| business way harder.
| fzfaa wrote:
| https://www.robinsloan.com/img/ghost-variations.jpg
|
| Is this related to that thing where one restaurant creates
| several fake restaurants in food delivery apps?
| dcow wrote:
| The songs in the playlist are the first 4 chords of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachelbel's_Canon essentially
| looped for 47 seconds. I V vi iii appears very frequently in pop
| music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I. If one were
| trying to exploit the algorithm...
| cimus wrote:
| I listened to Romilda Gebbia if that was what you were refering
| to, and to me it sounds like I V vi IV.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| iirc those are the same "4 chords" used by the Axis of
| Awesome [1]. Certainly sounded like that to my ear from
| memory, but don't really have enough music notation/theory
| knowledge to know for certain and I may have been mis-
| remembering.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ
| kaoD wrote:
| Just to expand a bit on the progression: it works because iii
| and vi sound a lot like I.
|
| E.g. in they key of C I (C E G), iii (E G B), vi (A C E). iii
| can be seen as Imaj7 without the root (C) and vi as Iadd6
| without the 5th (G).
|
| So basically this is I-V-I-I with some decoration, being V-I
| the quintessential movement in western classical music.
| [deleted]
| SantiagoElf wrote:
| Let's not forget the reverse scam:
|
| _Music Business Worldwide's story explains how the moneymaking
| trick worked. "Soulful Music" had 467 songs by virtually unknown
| artists -- which is to say, artists who may have been created for
| the purpose of this alleged scheme. The vast majority of songs
| were about 30 seconds long, which is the minimum length a song
| needs to be to count as a monetized play on the service.
|
| The most probabl explanation for all this is that someone or
| someones in Bulgaria set up 1,200 computers with premium Spotify
| accounts, then had them play the songs on "Soulful Music"
| constantly. While it would cost $12,000 to set up all those
| accounts, the payoff would be worth it._
|
| Link -> https://www.inverse.com/article/41573-spotify-bulgarian-
| play...
| klabb3 wrote:
| Yes, it's very important piece of Spotify's rev share model, it
| has arbitrage built in(!), most people are not aware of this.
|
| Spotify pays PER STREAM, meaning that a bot account can funnel
| a massively disproportionate amount of revenue compared to a
| human one. In fact, you can generate more revenue than your
| subscription costs. Artists have complained about this forever,
| because 24/7 playlists at the gym with Justin Bieber on repeat
| would "steal" from the indie enthusiasts. And they are right!
| If I use my account to listen to one band only, my $10
| contribution should go to them (modulo taxes, margins etc).
|
| I'm sure they have "patched" some of these holes in recent
| times (ie some half baked abuse detection system that scammers
| can circumvent easily). But the per-stream principle remains,
| and it's such a massive incentive fuck-up from every angle,
| beyond salvation. And now they have (predictably) content farms
| and money laundering at their necks, and they're still not
| patching it.
| werds wrote:
| i cannot fathom how your example here supports the idea that
| Bieber playing 24/7 in a gym is stealing money from the niche
| artist who are listen to by only a handful of fans?
| bombcar wrote:
| I think the idea is that there are two Spotify subscribers
| in the whole world.
|
| You, who listen to IndieBand(tm) for a total of an hour a
| week or so.
|
| The Gym(tm) who plays Bieber 24/7 every day, all month.
|
| You each pay $10 a month, so $20 total. Spotify allocates
| based on plays, so Bieber gets 720 "played hours" and
| IndieBand(tm) gets 4. So Bieber gets 720/724 of the $20.
|
| The OP is saying in this case, Bieber should get $10 and
| IndieBand(tm) $10 (minus fees, etc).
| klabb3 wrote:
| Exactly. Per stream means that accounts that play music
| 24/7 are allocating orders of magnitude more revenue than
| yours or mine, much more even than what they paid in
| subscription fee. It's an open arbitrage incentive model,
| ripe for minimum risk exploitation by gray hats. Of
| course, this practice has the ability to erode actual
| artist revenue, which is already very low.
| akshayshah wrote:
| Only loosely related, but Robin Sloan also wrote a truly
| excellent article about using neural nets to produce music:
| https://www.mcdbooks.com/features/sourdough
|
| In his book Sourdough, he spends quite a while describing the
| music of the Mazg - a fictional group of European migrants. For
| the audiobook version of Sourdough, he trains a SampleRNN model
| on a particular genre of Croatian music, then has the model
| produce Mazg music. The description of machine learning is vivid
| and approachable, and the audio clips are fantastic.
| nullhack wrote:
| Sybil attack on Spotify! Since both Spotify and Grubhub have a
| digital layer, actors can multiply endlessly!
|
| Is the only solution to retreat to campfire songs and home
| cooking?
| derbOac wrote:
| 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?
| ciropantera wrote:
| 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 of this story anymore though.
| johnorourke wrote:
| This story perhaps:
| https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/fake-artists-
| have-...
| ciropantera wrote:
| Exactly, thanks
| slickrick216 wrote:
| In the same spirit it could be Bayesian poisoning of the
| recommendation algorithm
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_poisoning
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| This has been going on for quite a while, since 2013 at least.
|
| Rdio used to have a top played section which for a while got
| dominated by some very very weird albums. This was one of them:
|
| https://open.spotify.com/track/0e3DihEy2kupmSSpzqfqNP
|
| The story behind how it got to the top is outlined here:
|
| https://musicfeeds.com.au/news/melbourne-programmer-hacks-hi...
| HailTheGreenOne wrote:
| "hacking script" xD my sides
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| This sounds straight out of a Cory Doctorow or Charles Stross
| story (especially the multi-named takeout restaurant/kitchen).
|
| Edit: or perhaps Bruce Sterling, as I'm sure they'd tell me.
| nico-mac wrote:
| Here is an analysis of the playlist:
|
| https://www.chosic.com/spotify-playlist-analyzer/?plid=2IaWg...
|
| Interesting to notice that even when there are only little
| variations on the same song, the analysis (which is powered by
| the Spotify API) shows very different indicators for each of the
| songs in danceability, accousticness, valence, etc. This makes
| rather unexpected that all those songs could come together in a
| recomendation system.
| tao3 wrote:
| I heard alot of people are doing quick cash by this
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| This is so fascinating! And... somehow shiver-inducing creepy:
| https://open.spotify.com/track/680Xyj7IgbBioIZ8BylEkJ?si=572...
|
| This is almost certainly generated as well, found through a
| recommendation series from the article.
|
| It's so creepy because it feels like something that isn't made by
| a human, like composition uncanny valley!
|
| Edit: As a side note, you should be careful to not like the music
| in this article. I suspect it will poison your Discover Weekly
| and other algorithmically generated playlists as they seem to be
| based on other listeners' data.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| OK, so if you want to force the recommendation system to
| generate similar music, of course you can use the "Go to song
| radio" feature on Spotify.
|
| Here are some other interesting seeds.
|
| * 0:47 seed (Romilda Prime):
| https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E8NyZRPJ6i5rq?si=...
|
| * Venera Fanucci seed:
| https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E8PTURLXiSzw3?si=...
|
| * Scars Hayden seed:
| https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E8NLdq3OfZZrl?si=...
|
| * Chinpe seed:
| https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E8O73Ntg828PD?si=...
|
| This one is interesting because even the album art is
| generated, rather than stock. The artist names are usually all
| uppercase. Perhaps a different author, but the techniques seem
| the same.
|
| * Western Wilds seed:
| https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E8LLKjmBVSRwb?si=...
|
| (See also Exboro Key, Defiant Leather, Gallisle Isle...)
|
| * Hollow Linen seed:
| https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E8PeWgO6Bpowe?si=...
|
| * Surrane Path seed:
| https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E8NCJ0IQOCfKi?si=...
|
| This is a broken classical music generator, perhaps the most
| interesting!
| dangrossman wrote:
| > 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 options in the area. Any
| time I come across a restaurant that looks worth trying out, I
| have to look up the address to see if it actually exists, or if
| it's just IHOP masquerading as a burger bar.
| slater wrote:
| Haha, right on. I love me some Indian food, and there's ten
| different Indian "restaurants" near me, all located at the same
| address. I looked it up on Google Maps, and it's basically a
| hole-in-the-wall restaurant space that can barely hold one
| restaurant, never mind ten. Yet Grubhub et al. don't seem to
| care one way or another
| Wistar wrote:
| There's also ghost kitchens cranking out food for delivery
| without any traditional restaurant space at all.
|
| Here's a commercial ghost kitchen explanation to
| restaurateurs:
|
| https://cloudkitchens.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-ghost-
| kitch...
| cpersona wrote:
| I remember looking out of the window with my girlfriend trying
| to find a restaurant that Grubhub claimed was across the
| street. It was a ghost kitchen inside of another place and the
| food is pretty good, but I have generally stuck with places
| I've at least seen with my own eyes since then.
| akira2501 wrote:
| I wonder if that's a consequence of the "gig economy" working
| in the wrong direction. Perhaps the relationship should be
| between the delivery service "gig fleet" and the restaurants
| themselves. The ratings and feedback information would actually
| be more useful and would allow different restaurants to post
| different contract rates through the service based upon these
| ratings.
|
| That would actually provide a service that doesn't dilute their
| brand. As it is, these restaurants have just found a way to
| counter this negative outcome by diluting this third party
| marketplace itself.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| (Shrug) This is how hotel restaurants, including some very good
| ones, have always worked. What difference does it make what
| other ethnicities/varieties of food the restaurant delivers?
| somebodythere wrote:
| Virtual restaurants don't have the reputation to burn like a
| brick-and-mortar with a well-known brand does. Normally if a
| restaurant presents itself as primarily selling one menu item
| (common examples: pizza, wings, milkshakes) you expect them
| do do it really well. But with virtual restaurants there's no
| need to build up a good reputation by serving quality food
| since your strategy is to drown out competitors by putting up
| dozens of fake brands, each with a supposed "specialty". If
| one of your identities is tarnished it is trivial to spin up
| a new one.
|
| I remember the first time I got caught by this, I excitedly
| ordered from a "Korean fried chicken" place on Uber eats, and
| when the food arrived it was heat-from-frozen chicken tenders
| drowned in unappetizing sauce. I felt scammed, and the food
| was so bad, I didn't even manage to finish what I had
| ordered. Later I looked up the restaurant and discovered it
| shared an address with an unremarkable local burger chain. I
| had a similar experience with another virtual restaurant and
| at this point I always check if it's a VR before ordering
| delivery from an app and treat it as a strong negative signal
| to the quality of food.
|
| This is obviously a lot different from your hotel example
| because the hotel restaurant's reputation is inextricable
| from the hotel itself; not only do patrons always know where
| their room service is coming from, bad food/service reflects
| poorly on the hotel as well. The hotel has a lot more to lose
| than the virtual restaurant.
| eduction wrote:
| This is a really interesting comparison! And good context. Is
| the hotel operating multiple restaurants from one kitchen
| really different (as some comments here seem to imply)
| because each has its own physical space? In a way that's more
| "skin in the game" for a hotel vs a ghost kitchen
| proliferating brands bounded only by their ability to cook
| the food. On the other hand, that's a pretty significant
| bound.
| p1necone wrote:
| What? Hotel restaurants have always convincingly appeared to
| people as 20 different restaurants while operating at the
| same physical location? A place serving a lot of different
| types of food is not the same thing, it's still one
| restaurant and they're not making any effort to hide that
| from the hotel guests.
|
| The multitudes of different places at Disneyworld that all
| operate out of the same massive underground/hidden kitchen
| complex might be a better example.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _What? Hotel restaurants have always convincingly appeared
| to people as 20 different restaurants while operating at
| the same physical location?_
|
| Yes. Hotels with multiple restaurants tend to have only one
| kitchen, because why wouldn't they?
|
| Again, I don't understand what's so offensive or
| controversial about this concept. I'm probably
| misunderstanding the objection.
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| Do you truly believe those situations are equivalent?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Uh, well, yeah?
|
| I'm _obviously_ missing something important in the
| argument you 're making.
| gjs278 wrote:
| p1necone wrote:
| 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 more consumers.
|
| The main difference between this and the hotel case is
| that when a business lists another "restaurant" on Uber
| Eats/Grubhub/whatever they're effectively taking away
| some advertising space from all the other restaurants on
| the platform. Whereas when a hotel adds another
| "restaurant" frontend to their kitchen, nothing really
| changes for all the other places in town. And it would be
| painfully obvious if one hotel opened up 10 nearly
| identical e.g. indian restaurants on the same premises.
|
| TLDR: It's not possible for the practice to get to a
| predatory level in the physical world so it's less of a
| concern, even though it's fundamentally very similar.
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| > multiple different options whose food would never
| belong on the same menu together at a dine in restaurant.
|
| Any halfway decent hotel in a major Asian city will
| happily serve up (approximations of) Chinese stir-fries,
| Japanese sushi, Indian curries, Italian pizza and
| American burgers from its restaurant.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| 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.
| function_seven wrote:
| 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?
| djmips wrote:
| I don't mind it myself. If you like the food it's OK if a
| downtown bar and grill is also sidelining as a chicken
| restaurant online. They have slow times and a paid kitchen
| staff. Go for it!
|
| And some of the other ghost kitchens / home address food prep
| is pretty good. Like there was an ice cream place that
| delivered until midnight ( out of somebodies garage ) their ice
| cream was cooled down to well below zero so it was not melted
| when you got it.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Isn't it really easy to avoid all these fake restaurants, since
| the fakes only appear when you're searching for takeout? Just
| pretend you want to dine in, find a restaurant that you want
| that way, then pull it up in your takeout app of choice.
| toxicFork wrote:
| That's not really easy. That's a lot of work.
| ryeights wrote:
| Google Maps shows food delivery options now.
| josephcsible wrote:
| How is that a lot of work? Is it a lot of work if you
| really are looking for a restaurant where you can dine in?
| dangrossman wrote:
| On the delivery services, you can search all of the menus
| of places that deliver to you at once. If I want a club
| sandwich, I can find what 32 restaurants will deliver me
| a club sandwich. There is no other place I know of that
| will tell me what restaurants in some radius of me sell
| club sandwiches for dine-in, that I'd then have to cross-
| reference with which are available on my preferred
| delivery service anyway. It's a lot more work.
| chupchap wrote:
| It's just SEO I think
| gernb wrote:
| And this is why the semantic web will never work.
| smarx007 wrote:
| No, they will just all be marked "owl:sameAs" (though it's
| not as smooth as one would think [1]) in semantic web.
|
| [1]: https://www.w3.org/2009/12/rdf-ws/papers/ws21
| asdff wrote:
| 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.
| MockObject wrote:
| > I made sure to never order food from a place that wasn't a
| brick and mortar again
|
| What's wrong with food from a ghost kitchen?
| asdff wrote:
| It tasted like it cost about $6 too much for what it was
| dangrossman wrote:
| In my experience, it's inferior in every way, perhaps
| because they have no accountability the same way a
| standalone restaurant has. For example, a pizza place near
| me opened multiple ghost kitchens, including a Saladworks
| and Guy Fieri's Flavortown.
|
| There's no Saladworks if you visit their address, just the
| pizza place. They offer the same menu as Saladworks, the
| chain of fast service salad shops, but don't have the same
| supplier or training or equipment as a Saladworks. This
| pizza place just attempts to recreate the same salads using
| inferior ingredients, pizza toppings, generic dressings,
| and generic plastic takeout containers. The result doesn't
| taste like a Saladworks salad and is smaller than a
| Saladworks salad. I've tried it twice and neither
| recreation of Saladworks was faithful, missing ingredients
| both times, with a different lettuce mix than Saladworks
| uses, etc.
|
| There's no Guy Fieri restaurant if you visit their address
| either. The food from this brand of the ghost kitchen is
| just inedible. It has 5 reviews on Yelp locally so far, and
| all are one star. They're microwaving burgers, sending out
| raw pasta, sending out easy mac with pizza toppings as a
| fancy loaded mac & cheese, using the same generic plastic
| takeout containers they do for Saladworks.
|
| And yet at least they have a brand to burn. What I was
| actually frustrated with in my comment a few levels up is
| the places that list their own menu, sliced and diced in
| different ways, under 20+ different names. If someone
| complains about the quality of "Simply Crepes", they can
| just remove that listing, since those crepes are also
| available under "Morning Times Cafe", "Morning Breakfast
| Sandwich Bar", "The Daily Fare", "The Coffee Creperey",
| etc.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Seriously wonder why this isn't taken down. Should be pretty
| trivial given overlap of physical or payment addresses if
| they're registering the same restaurant several times on the
| same platform. Probably even possible to do it by hand.
| indymike wrote:
| If it generates revenue, it's not going down. There is
| absolutely no incentive at all to remove it. In fact, it
| gives the consumer more choices, and more ways to give money
| to the gig delivery service, and acts as a bulwark against
| being bullied by chains.
| toxicFork wrote:
| > it gives the consumer more choices
|
| How? If a choice of "this restaurant" or "that restaurant"
| both take you to "this restaurant", is that really a
| choice?
| vintermann wrote:
| The equivalent on Spotify are _not_ generating revenue,
| though. The existence of these algorithmically generated
| spam artists doesn 't factor into anyone's decision to buy
| premium or not - at least not in a positive way. And still
| they're there.
| ABraidotti wrote:
| This reminded me-- years ago, I ran into an old high school
| friend and asked him what he had been up to. He had gotten into
| graphic design and wound up partnering with a couple of guys who
| had a recording studio. They had a niche product and needed cover
| art -- and lots of it. He explained to me that they would release
| albums of fart noises on iTunes -- like many, many albums -- and
| the tracks would get a ton of plays, and people would purchase
| the albums. The partners made enough to pay him a good salary for
| just illustrating fart album cover art.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| this is one of my favorite HN comments of all time
| DecoPerson wrote:
| 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 nothing to do with her.
|
| You'd think, she shouldn't be releasing any new works, you know,
| on account of being long-deceased and all. Therefore Spotify
| could block releases claiming her as an artist. Unfortunately,
| there are new renditions of her work being performed, recorded
| and published regularly, by many different groups. All of them
| have the right (perhaps even an ethical duty) to put Fanny
| Mendelssohn as one of the artists. These are works I'd like to
| hear, so Spotify's recommendation algorithms are on the right
| track.
|
| How on earth can Spotify distinguish real Fanny from fake Fanny?
| Jolter wrote:
| They should (and probably do, behind the scenes) have separate
| data fields for composer and performer. At least, I believe
| that labels will input those separately for each track, to
| enable correct tracking of compensation. Then Spotify will lump
| them together into "artist" n the UI, I assume. To make it
| easier for a casual user to find what they want. The
| "performer" Fanny Mendelssohn should probably not be confused
| with the Composer of the same name, and they should ensure this
| by using a unique id for each person rather than just a string
| field.
| entropy_ wrote:
| I like how you think labels correctly label anything. I
| happen to work at a music streaming service (not Spotify) and
| I can definitely say that those datasets are insanely noisy
| and generally you can't really trust labels to, well, label
| their data correctly for anything.
| vintermann wrote:
| I was about to say something similar. I don't even work at
| a streaming service, but I know label-provided metadata is
| enough of a steaming pile that there are third party start-
| ups which promise to help with the problem and such.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| One track I bought on iTunes had credits for both "Bob
| Dylan" and "B. Dylan" on the same song, or something very
| similar like that.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| Classical music metadata is SUPER broken.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I don't think it's nefarious, just incompetence. I like Poppy,
| the bubble gum pop youtube girl turned metal, turned grunge
| artist. Her name is pretty generic though, and I've seen
| multiple artists with the same name have their stuff put under
| her identity on spotify briefly. The artists I've seen are
| clearly not fake artists trying to sneak into her brand.
|
| Composer / performer is a whole nother metadata thing that
| should happen.
| nsilvestri wrote:
| It's a common enough problem that Distrokid has a support
| article on the matter. https://support.distrokid.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/360015182574...
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| > 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.
| nerdponx wrote:
| To be fair, Spotify often conflates lesser-known artists that
| have the same name, particularly if they both inhabit some
| kind of "alt" genre, even if the two genres are totally
| _different_ alt genres. Are they two different artists, or
| did they just change their sound?
|
| Sometimes it's obvious (e.g. techno DJ and death metal band
| with same name), but sometimes it's not even easy for a human
| to decide (two unrelated indie bands from the early '10s with
| the same name).
|
| So it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that it can be
| exploited for money laundering and/or algorithm revenue
| farming.
| peddling-brink wrote:
| The person you replied to was suggesting that the previous
| post was a setup to be able to use that last line. Fanny is
| a slang term.
| vintermann wrote:
| Probably serious enough, since the album they describe
| exists. Spotify is smart enough to know that it isn't "the"
| Fanny Mendelssohn though - at least in the artist database.
| It could well be that Release Radar is dumber and is fooled
| by the matching name.
| hahajk wrote:
| Or enough other people were fooled and listen to the "fake"
| Fanny, creating a listener correlation between the real and
| fake Fannys.
| vintermann wrote:
| Release Radar by its nature will try to recommend tracks
| with very few plays (if any). It is supposed to solve the
| "bootstrap" problem in recommendation systems.
|
| In retrospect, I think it's more likely that Fake Fanny
| Mendlelssohn did NOT inform Spotify that they were a
| different person, and Spotify only split it out after a
| lot of Felix/Fanny fans clicked "I did NOT like this"
| when the track was put in their Release Radar.
| warty_affrays wrote:
| The Release Radar playlist is supposed to contain new
| releases from artists you already listen to. I think you
| might be right about the release radar being a method
| they use to separate out bands with the same name. I've
| definitely noticed bands with the same name in my Release
| Radar. It would be useful if Spotify exposed a method to
| report different bands under the same name. The do not
| recommend is a different signal since maybe I also like
| the new band. I probably mess up Spotify's recommendation
| algorithm for me since I use the heart button to flag
| albums as listened to regardless of my enjoyment since
| there isn't a another way to mark albums as "listened"
| like there is for podcasts.
| vintermann wrote:
| There is a tool, but it's for the artists only. Probably
| kept as a carrot to encourage artists to register with
| Spotify.
| [deleted]
| labster wrote:
| 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.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| This ends up being quite a hairy conversation, normally.
| irrational wrote:
| What if there was a new artist with the same name? Not too
| crazy. There was another kid in our high school with the exact
| same first, middle and last name as my brother. No relation.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It happens; what last.fm would do is add the country of
| origin to the band, like Shining and Shining (nor) to
| differentiate the Swedish depressive black metal band and the
| Norwegian extreme avant-garde jazz metal band.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| > on account of being long-deceased and all
|
| posthumous releases are a thing
| cardamomo wrote:
| Not really for the likes of Fanny Mendelssohn.
| kixiQu wrote:
| This is incorrect, but it's principally incorrect _because_
| we all abuse the artist field to contain _composer_
| information. This is done, I surmise, because figuring out
| when to display the composer information (performances of
| composed works) and when not to (bands) is too hard while
| delivering consistent UX.
| strbean wrote:
| It could be as simple as another piece of metadata on the
| track.
| vintermann wrote:
| That would be work for the label. Most of them won't DO
| the w word.
| kixiQu wrote:
| And on the file level, it is! But then do you as a music
| player / streaming service display that all the time,
| when most people are not listening to classical music and
| do not care about the composer? Do you make the user
| manage which columns are visible? (Almost every HN user
| misses when more software did this. Almost every normal
| user found it confusing/annoying.) What about publishers
| who do not give a damn that Johann Sebastian Bach did not
| perform this digital recording because they know it'll
| SEO way better to have him in the artist field? Now are
| you displaying all that inconsistency?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Isn't it principally an industry thing to hide the
| composer, they don't want us to know that the pop is from
| a "factory" and picked for the artist, they want the
| public to believe the myth that the manufactured band sit
| on mountaintops with their instruments coming up with new
| grooves (or whatever).
|
| Can't you just let the user decide "artist + track" or
| "artist + composer(s) + track" or ...
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| That's their point though, it's not the same across
| musical industries.
|
| Pop music? Yeah people don't care about the composer
| credits.
|
| Classical music or a jazz standards band? You want the
| performing artist and the composer.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Fanny Mendelssohn was personally involved in roughly 0% of
| the recordings that come up on Spotify when you search for
| her name, but I'd bet any fan of hers would be OK being
| recommended most of those recordings, or most any new ones
| that came out using her as a search term.
|
| Classical music categorization (where the composer of the
| music is often of more interest than the performer) is very
| difficult to reconcile with pop music (where the opposite
| is more likely to be true).
| randoglando wrote:
| You know you're right
| weci2i wrote:
| You win the internet
| guythedudebro wrote:
| Ok, this is epic
| irrational wrote:
| Is there a way on Spotify to say, "don't show me any songs less
| than X seconds/minutes in length"?
| killjoywashere wrote:
| 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/
| abledon wrote:
| Fascinating find! He nails so much about todays music. the
| mystery artist is barfing algorithmic refuse into poor
| unsuspecting victims' neural grooves. Seems to echo shades of the
| creepy algorithmic bright colored child videos youtube have.
| alexambarch wrote:
| Tangentially Related:
|
| The experimental artist Arca released an album[1] in 2020 which
| consisted of 100 AI-generated remixes of her song Riquiqui. It
| was part pretentious artsy experiment and part marketing stunt
| for some AI company, but an interesting concept nonetheless.
|
| [1]:https://open.spotify.com/album/3bd81d2yQGiDRzckcQ42dr
| RyanShook wrote:
| Haven't published on Spotify before but isn't it time consuming
| to create new artist profiles?
| vintermann wrote:
| You don't publish on Spotify. You publish on one of the
| services which have a distribution deal with Spotify, like
| TuneCore or CDBaby. Some of the dodgier services like that have
| features to make this exact sort of thing easy (for instance,
| you get to choose a new publisher label name every time).
| ggm wrote:
| What "cost" to the money launderer? What is the "cost" like,
| compared to e.g. mules taking cash to casinos, or laboriously
| processing e-card visa style money?
|
| ie how "effective" is this, compared to alternatives? I had a
| belief the rate of IPR payment was low, so this is probably a low
| rate of return, high cost, fully digital method.
|
| Which in my theory, would also be making spotify significant
| profit, as the facilitator. Are they now at some legal risk if
| they can "detect" this traffic?
| seibelj wrote:
| Every single business can be a vector for money laundering.
| From cash laundromats to high end technology, if the launderer
| owns the business then it has potential. I would estimate the
| government catches somewhere in the ballpark of 0.00000001% of
| all laundering. Businesses also have zero incentive to stop
| this activity as long as they get their margin.
| vintermann wrote:
| I have asked people who work with preventing money laundering
| how expensive it is, how much you get back from a launderer
| in clean money for every dollar you pay him in dirty ones.
| They have all estimated a 20-25% premium.
|
| That doesn't seem like it would be sustainable if only
| 0.00000001% was caught.
| seibelj wrote:
| I think the difference is if you do it yourself vs. trust a
| third party. The third party is charging a risk premium.
| vintermann wrote:
| And I'm saying if the risk was that small, they couldn't
| charge that premium.
| ggm wrote:
| yes. but the cost side matters: if a criminal has $1,000,000
| but can only recover $1,000 "safely" burning $999,000 then a
| method which returns $500,000 for burn of $500,000 is better,
| if riskier. "it depends"
| seibelj wrote:
| I worked in an office next to an Uber clone that was
| clearly unsuccessful. Yet they had a significant Series A
| from a Russian oligarch, then got bought a few years later
| at something like 10x the Series A funding amount by a
| different Russian oligarch. There was a press release and a
| news story about how wonderful this was.
|
| This scheme was so clearly a laundering play, but everyone
| pretended it was some amazing exit. I'm confident the tech
| industry is full of these shenanigans, but I've never seen
| anything like this uncovered.
| ggm wrote:
| If they can offload on the market, this might be net
| lossless or lower loss at scale than other methods.
|
| I guess taking net company worth into a bank in Cyprus or
| something and using it as security to buy land, boats,
| whatever achieves the real outcome. Even if only some
| 1/nth can be collateralised
| thomasfl wrote:
| Always nice to read a nice fairytale with the wonderful drawings
| by Theodor Kittelsen. The norwegian artist is famous for his
| depictions of trolls, and also illustrated the old icelandic book
| Snorre saga with depictions of vikings.
| NickRandom wrote:
| I wonder if it is something similar to this? - _Spotify games its
| own royalty system by creating and promoting in-house, or "fake"
| artists._ https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15961416/spotify-
| fake-art...
| alkonaut wrote:
| This is the TikTok-ification of music. The required response is
| the same here, as it is to the consumption of any other media,
| which is the same as when ordering food.
|
| Don't order food out of a random dark kitchen. Order from a brick
| and mortar restaurant _you know_.
|
| Don't use algorithmic feeds to discover video. Find a
| channel/producer you like and watch that.
|
| The same applies to music. Assume everything fed to you is a
| tiktok style snippet of short term gratification that has no real
| value other than keeping you around for a few more seconds until
| the next snippet, while costing as little as possible for both
| producer and delivery platform.
|
| Don't waste time being upset that everything is TikTok. If you
| scroll the TikTok feed, Watch Instagram reels, Order Dark Kitchen
| food, or listen to generated Spotify playlists, you are part of
| the problem.
| suction wrote:
| Doesn't it come down to ,,be a critical thinker instead of a
| mindless consumer"? From that follows that you don't just
| scroll through the homepage but should use the search function,
| in an informed way.
|
| Which in turn already fails at the majority of people being too
| lazy to type, and not knowing how to search for things they
| want. They quickly give up, and just take the easy route of
| consuming what's served to them.
|
| It's the modern equivalent of falling on the sofa, switching on
| the TV, and just watching whatever's on until they fall asleep.
|
| Getting a majority of people to care about their media
| consumption is probably a hopeless cause.
| [deleted]
| permo-w wrote:
| the comment seems to place the blame and responsibility
| squarely on the consumer
|
| yes consumers create the demand, and yes corporations are
| _simply_ fulfilling that demand, but no, changing consumer
| behaviour is not the solution
|
| it is unpleasant to say, but most (all?) people are not
| rational actors, and no matter how much proselytising to the
| choir on obscure message boards goes on, that is not going to
| change
|
| given the free opportunity, especially with the urging of self-
| interested corporations, most people will become addicted to
| cigarettes, or slot machines, or micro-transactions, or heroin.
| the solution is not to teach some bible of consumer behaviour
| to a group of people that probably don't do these things
| anyway, it is to use public organisation to force these large,
| perversely-incentivised groups of people to follow a set of
| rules that maintain a healthy media space
| schnevets wrote:
| It is an awful side-effect of products getting bazaar-ified,
| where technology reduces friction in entering the marketplace
| and new "stalls" appear en masse. Human curation is a clear
| remedy - I can only listen to so much music or eat so many
| meals a day, so do I really need an algorithm to "optimize"
| that quantity?
|
| I bet many listeners believe the Spotify-presented playlists
| are being curated, as if the stock image models in the
| thumbnail actually are jamming together and meeting with
| musicians face-to-face. So much of the recommendation service
| seems obfuscated to customers that I honestly don't understand
| what the end game is. Everyone is racing to just be "stickier"
| than their opponent that I can imagine a sudden pivot in
| customer demands where "Made for you" becomes a technology
| mistake akin to "Facebook Games"
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I mean I will use the algorithmic lists to discover new music -
| with limited success in recent years, I might add - and the
| autoplaying 'radio' after an album helps to keep me in a flow,
| but I usually start with a specific band / album or playlist.
| mekkkkkk wrote:
| Yes, you are part of the problem. But you are also a victim to
| the problem. You can only expect so much individual resistance
| against conveniences that are being launched into your brain by
| massive industries. Succumbing to these conveniences is highly
| understandable.
| fassssst wrote:
| https://www.kexp.org/
|
| Eclectic music curated by real DJ's, you're welcome.
| adamweld wrote:
| kexp is the fucking best.
| werds wrote:
| https://vintageobscura.net/ https://imr.party/
| https://www.nts.live/ https://sohoradiolondon.com
| https://worldwidefm.net/ https://www.dublab.com/
| https://netilradio.com/
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live:bbc_6music
| https://poolsuite.net/ https://somafm.com/
|
| i only listen to live radio, this is my station rotation (in
| addition to KEXP)
| gorjusborg wrote:
| The Monte Carlo music composition method.
| dizhn wrote:
| It sounds like the Fake Artists thing which is designed to make
| sure Spotify gets all the money and does not have to pay
| royalties.
|
| They basically either have salaried/contracted musicians or pay a
| one time fee without royalties to make passable songs in every
| genre. Then they push their own songs in lists so people will
| listen to them more than "real" artists.
|
| https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/fake-artists-have-...
| lizardactivist wrote:
| Obviously not. A scheme like that would never stand up to
| scrutiny or an actual investigation.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Could this be an artist doing A/B tests to find the best samples
| to inject into a broader composition?
| tjwds wrote:
| If you go to the playlist's "playlist radio," you can find even
| more variations; I figured > 100 was a good number to stop at.
| https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4pyIM5We0dd01U4KQyVmkU
| fluidcruft wrote:
| I wonder if it could be some sort of genetic algorithm
| selectively breeding the ones that are successful?
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