
Spotify's Spam War - iamben
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/spotifys-spam-war-could-change-how-we-listen-to-music
======
pud
DistroKid founder here.

When people generate fake streams on Spotify (ex: put a 45-second track on
repeat all week, volume on zero, for the purpose of fraudulently extracting
money from Spotify...), said people are actually stealing from legitimate
artists. That's because Spotify pays artists a pro-rata share of Spotify's
revenue, based on how many times an artists' music was streamed.

Math: If there's $10 in the pot and my band has 5 (real) streams, and your
band has 5 (fake) streams--I'm getting $5 instead of the $10 I deserve.

Spotify's fraud detection system is a very good thing for artists. The system
exists solely to protect artist, and has no other obvious upside for Spotify.

~~~
spyder
_" Spotify's fraud detection system is a very good thing for artists."_

It isn't if anybody can remove an artist's songs just by click fraud/too much
listening. If they can detect the fraudulent plays then they should just not
pay for those but should not remove the song.

~~~
andybak
How about if they can detect only some of the fraudulent plays? That changes
the economics considerably. The reason the tax people charge punitive fines is
because they know many tax dodges go undetected. Therefore they need the
deterrent effect to make it uneconomical to try a scam.

If detection was 100% - then a scam is impossible and punishment/deterrence is
unnecessary.

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6stringmerc
> _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.

~~~
uremog
How many times is an artist allowed to play their own song before it's
considered fraud though?

~~~
pc86
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.

~~~
uremog
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.

~~~
iambateman
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.

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drostie
The insane thing here is that Spotify _could_ just change the incentive
structure and then it wouldn't _have_ to take drastic action.

"You will gain 0.00x cents per listen, _up to a maximum of 100 listens /day
for any individual user_" and "Your songs must all sound like distinct pieces,
as judged by our testing team" seem jointly sufficient to rule out the two
biggest forms of abuse here: sure, let someone stream 30-second clips of
silence; after 50 minutes stop paying for it. Multiple silent clips are a
violation only because they both sound the same.

~~~
Eridrus
It could be even easier: don't count every listen the same; split each user's
subscription fees among the songs they listen to each month.

~~~
gdsimoes
Why don't they do that?

~~~
garrettgrimsley
In any given period of time some people are going to listen to the same tracks
multiple times. For example, on many radio stations the selection of music is
really quite small, and the majority of airtime is occupied by less than 100
songs. If people are repeatedly listening to those songs then why shouldn't
the artist that created them receive compensation proportionate to the number
of plays the song received? I couldn't find data on Spotify users' listening
habits, but here's my own, sorted descending by track plays, for example:
[http://www.last.fm/user/GarrettGrimsley/library/tracks](http://www.last.fm/user/GarrettGrimsley/library/tracks)

~~~
Eridrus
If everyone listened to the same amount of tracks, they would receive the
exact same amount of compensation as they do now.

My suggestion (which has been raised by others many times), is that if a user
listens to 1000 tracks/month, their listens should be worth 10x less than a
user who only listens to 100 tracks/month, since they are both paying Spotify
the same amount.

I'm not sure if it would result in very meaningful distinction in how much
artists are actually compensated (maybe it would negatively harm smaller
artists because, hypothetically, they are listened to more by people who
listen to lots of music).

I'm actually pretty curious about why they have chosen to stick with this
model, since the alternative I've described is pretty obvious and has been
proposed many times.

I would say that there is more value in songs that are actively selected vs
just played automatically (e.g. I often go to an artist's page, select a
specific song, then let the playlist play without me paying much attention),
but I don't know if that's really an economically meaningful distinction.

~~~
xorcist
Flattr works like that. I found it made me, as a low volume user, very
concious about what I click on.

If Spotify made the change I would probably think more about what I listen to.
Perhaps even use a second non-paid account for certain listening. But I might
be a minority.

I would suggest yet another model: payment per unique listeners per day (or
week, or month). It wouldn't be a big step from their current model but would
be a lot less gameable.

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awjr
I'm very confused by this approach. You have two types of users "free and ad-
supported" and paid subscribers.

For the subscribers, it's easy. Take the amount they pay, take a service fee,
and the rest is allocated between the artists they play that month.

The "free" users, take the ad revenue generated by the user (up to a cap) and
allocate to the artists they play during a month.

Pay on play really does not seem to work when you have two different revenue
streams and you're trying to balance both.

------
buckbova
>> Removing songs suspected of fraudulent plays is just one example of the
power that digital storefronts like iTunes and Spotify have over how we listen
to music, and the music itself. These services are slowly writing the rules of
what is and isn’t considered a song, or an acceptable song title.

This just doesn't seems like a new problem. Media outlets have been doing this
since the beginning. Play along or make your own way. If you become big
enough, they'll beg for you to come back into the fold.

------
xivzgrev
I felt the author didn't like what happened to his friend and grasped at
everything possible to rile people against spotify. Spotify is a music
distribution platform that works in a free market. If you dont want to listen
to a track from them, look it up on many of the other platforms. Given musics
ugly history with piracy, I doubt we will ever find ourselves in a world where
spotify has a monopoly and we would see the effects the author is describing.
If you have legitimate fans, you and your fans will find a way to connect,
with or without spotify.

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lostlogin
>> A logical endgame of this type of defensive action is an environment where
a corporation gets to decide how users listen to music. << This isn't exactly
a new problem, and I'd argue it's harder to do now than before, and a large
reason why is because skipping a track is now possible.

------
bachmeier
> Spotify seems to be intensifying its efforts to combat fraud with actions
> that could leave the door open to censorship.

Unless the government is planning to get involved somehow, censorship is the
wrong word. Even setting that aside, though, it's hard to understand what that
sentence might mean. Best guess is that the author means Spotify would remove
spam. I can't imagine any justification for using a word like censorship to
describe an action like that.

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deweerdt
> Other musical spammers simply upload the same song thousands of times with
> different titles that are purposely similar to major hits

Reminded me of:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U2_(EP)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U2_\(EP\))

~~~
m6w6
Oh, I thought that was a joke about U2 on iTunes ;)

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chrisgd
Aren't the PROs (ASCAP and BMI) collecting a % of revenue from Spotify and
Pandora and then distributing that money based on streams to the artists?
Understanding this side of the music business makes no sense to me

~~~
6stringmerc
Those would typically be for major label signed artists. Some independent
artists might be affiliated with ASCAP and/or BMI, but not always. It's my
personal guess that most acts who upload via services such as TuneCore, CD
Baby, or DistroKid are not members of those societies, and thus get their
payments directly (through the service used).

------
brownbat
Ryan Walsh wrote this version for Vice, but I found his original for BDCwire
even more compelling.

[http://www.bdcwire.com/danvers-dude-makes-23k-musically-
spam...](http://www.bdcwire.com/danvers-dude-makes-23k-musically-spamming-on-
spotify/)

It's all focused on an artist who sits halfway between legitimate music and
spam. It raises questions about what counts as art, and what artists need to
do to avoid obscurity in a world with more content uploaded every day than
anyone could stream in their lifetime.

------
shkkmo
>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.

My concern here is quite different from the author's. If it is easy to trigger
takedown on tracks with no appeals process, this can be used by non-owners of
the track to troll artists or censor tracks they don't like

~~~
wallacoloo
Well, the author _did_ consider that possibility further down:

> If I wanted to seek revenge on a relatively unknown artist that I had a
> personal vendetta against, couldn't I simply repeatedly stream one of their
> songs in an effort to get their work removed from the service?

And this type of thing _has_ been a problem in related industries. Things like
this (used to?) happen with internet ad agencies, wherein a competitor will
try to hurt your business by emulating click-fraud on your website's ads. Or a
really passionate fan will think, "I'll support these guys by clicking their
ads a hundred times!".

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felixbraun
I fear it is not possible to prevent people from setting up computers/virtual
machines that play certain songs 24/7; and I'm surprised that there aren't
services yet that offer to do that on scale.

This might mean that Spotify's current business model can not work longterm?

~~~
noxToken
> _and I 'm surprised that there aren't services yet that offer to do that on
> scale_

How hard have you looked? I don't say that to be snarky, but that sounds like
a service with a bit of overhead for startup with little maintenance to run. I
don't think it would be openly advertised, however, for fear of legal action
from music services.

~~~
garrettgrimsley
This story was linked in the parent article:

[http://motherboard.vice.com/read/i-built-a-botnet-that-
could...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/i-built-a-botnet-that-could-
destroy-spotify-with-fake-listens)

------
fnordsensei
Spotify doesn't pay artists anything. They pay the rights holders, and they in
turn pay artists whatever is in their contract.

