>My anonymous source was testing how long they could get away with constantly streaming their own 45-second track on Spotify, to see whether the company had mechanisms in places to restrict artists from playing their own songs on repeat, and whether those micropennies per play would add up to some real cash. They racked up about 45,000 plays over a month before receiving this takedown email.
So what did this "annonomous source" do with the monies received from the 45,000 plays? Because describing it as a "test" is pretty generous to the person trying to game the system. A less flattering perspective might call it "attempted fraud" because it sure sounds self-serving.
>Sure, that's dirty play, and in a general sense, the action taken by Spotify in this case is justified and correct. But on closer inspection, the notice reveals a few troubling issues that could forecast a dark future for music fans.
No, it means that people trying to scam retailers won't be allowed to scam retailers. What is so difficult to understand?
>For one, Spotify took the extreme measure of removing the song entirely without any kind of probation or appeal process. A logical endgame of this type of defensive action is an environment where a corporation gets to decide how users listen to music.
Oh, I see, this author has an ingrained perspective of entitlement. Right. Well, I don't share their opinion.
Frankly I think DistroKid should ban that "testing" jackass and cite this specific article as why it happened. Mostly I think this as a happy DistroKid client.
>Take the case of Matt Farley, who released some 14,000 original songs on Spotify and iTunes, some with celebrity names in the title enticing people to play the tracks to earn some revenue for his efforts.
Yeah, DistroKid now has a checkbox hoop to jump through exactly because of this kind of shithead, counter-productive behavior. That's not engaging in art. That's being a shyster abusing the market for art.
Every time one of these "clever" little stunts gets pulled, I have to do more work on my end to prove I'm legit. It's not terribly difficult to work with, but it means DistroKid is having to adjust and spend time and effort in areas not primary to their service. That makes me pretty ticked off, both for the sake of DistroKid, and the potential jeopardizing of being able to maintain storefront access as an independent when clowns keep trying to steal from the "Take a penny" tray.
The example that the author gave about "Vitamin C" is also ridiculous. Spotify says that song has about 2.5 million streams. Even if he literally did nothing else but listen to it for 3 days straight, including not sleeping, that's only 1440 streams, or 0.06% of the total. Spotify wouldn't even notice.
Having spent many years writing essays in pursuit of an English degree, this article tries to come up with valid reasons why Spotify's policing of its system is not good for aritsts or consumers, and does not achieve those ends. The examples are not compelling, nor directly relevant.
I find your tone generally inappropriate for HN. I think you are letting your justified distaste for click fraud distract you from the legitimate questions raised by the article.
> The line in the DistroKid email that stood out to me was that “Real people don't listen to the same exact song thousands of times in a row.” The problem with this sentence is that a real person did generate these plays, using only Spotify’s internal “repeat 1” button.
I am inclined to agree that this is abusive behavior which is gaming the system. It is unclear to me what exactly makes this fraud. There was no use of scripts or a bot network, this was just someone using spotify's app in an unusual way. This is no misrepresentation here, no intent to deceive.
Spotify is certainly a private company that has no obligation to host anyone's music. If the market place isn't sufficiently competitive, than can create problems.
I think all of this points to underlying problems with the current economic model of pay-per-listen streaming. It invites spam and click fraud which in turn must be combated with opaque censorship rules about what we are allowed to listen to and how.
Well I think being vocally incredulous of anonymous tests is a valid perspective when it's framed in such fawning prose and should be treated as spurious of merit. I think there are simply no legitimate questions raised by the article. Rather, the author starts with a perspective and spends the entire time raising justifications for their doubt, and fails to provide compelling evidence that such "threats" are credible. Forgive me if I sincerely doubt the claim that the anonymous human actually clicked that Reapeat 1 button 45,000 times in the timeframe listed, which as noted in another comment, is akin to a full-time job - if actually true, it only goes to prove the inherit merit of Spotify's internal controls. Not the opposite of empty FUD speculation, which is pervasive in the article.
> Forgive me if I sincerely doubt the claim that the anonymous human actually clicked that Reapeat 1 button 45,000 times in the timeframe listed, which as noted in another comment, is akin to a full-time job - if actually true, it only goes to prove the inherit merit of Spotify's internal controls.
45,000 plays in a 30-day month is 1,500 times per day, or 62.5 times an hour. Which makes sense as they say it's a 0m 45s long track.
I don't think this is necessarily an area where you want Spotify to say "as long as you don't play it x+1 times you're fine" because then a lot of people will just play it x times a day every day. Playing a track 62 times an hour for a month is clearly fraud.
I get that it's fraud. People who want to be fraudulent will be testing this though. What if it were a less clear number - 20,000 times? 5,000 times? All it takes is one musician with a friend who has even limited coding experience to make it reasonably sophisticated.
Fraud is always combatted by making it cost-prohibitive, not impossible. You could write a botnet that plays a random song via 1,000 user accounts 24/7 that looks imperceptible.
It's the same issue Google had with black hat search results. They try to make life hard for people who break the rules and generally don't affect people who follow the rules.
And as long as there's a reasonable alternative, they have a financial incentive to keep the service from onerous restrictions.
Not trying to be dismissive or assume too much, but I genuinely think that Spotify probably runs some analytics to have a general understanding of what low, medium, and high human usage profiles look like. I mean, it just seems logical to me. Most of these cases seem so extreme that even cursory review would indicate suspicious activity.
So what did this "annonomous source" do with the monies received from the 45,000 plays? Because describing it as a "test" is pretty generous to the person trying to game the system. A less flattering perspective might call it "attempted fraud" because it sure sounds self-serving.
>Sure, that's dirty play, and in a general sense, the action taken by Spotify in this case is justified and correct. But on closer inspection, the notice reveals a few troubling issues that could forecast a dark future for music fans.
No, it means that people trying to scam retailers won't be allowed to scam retailers. What is so difficult to understand?
>For one, Spotify took the extreme measure of removing the song entirely without any kind of probation or appeal process. A logical endgame of this type of defensive action is an environment where a corporation gets to decide how users listen to music.
Oh, I see, this author has an ingrained perspective of entitlement. Right. Well, I don't share their opinion.
Frankly I think DistroKid should ban that "testing" jackass and cite this specific article as why it happened. Mostly I think this as a happy DistroKid client.
>Take the case of Matt Farley, who released some 14,000 original songs on Spotify and iTunes, some with celebrity names in the title enticing people to play the tracks to earn some revenue for his efforts.
Yeah, DistroKid now has a checkbox hoop to jump through exactly because of this kind of shithead, counter-productive behavior. That's not engaging in art. That's being a shyster abusing the market for art.
Every time one of these "clever" little stunts gets pulled, I have to do more work on my end to prove I'm legit. It's not terribly difficult to work with, but it means DistroKid is having to adjust and spend time and effort in areas not primary to their service. That makes me pretty ticked off, both for the sake of DistroKid, and the potential jeopardizing of being able to maintain storefront access as an independent when clowns keep trying to steal from the "Take a penny" tray.