
Beyoncé's and Kanye West's listener numbers manipulated in Tidal - ingve
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aftenposten.no%2Fkultur%2Fi%2FA2m3RM%2FDN-Beyoncs-og-Kanye-Wests-lyttertall-manipulert-i-Tidal&edit-text=
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ingve
The Digital Forensics Report from the Norwegian University of Science and
Technology has more information, describing how they used statistical analysis
to determine that there has in fact been manipulation of the playback number
data at particular times, and shows the python code they used.

[https://www.dn.no/staticprojects/special/2018/05/09/0600/dok...](https://www.dn.no/staticprojects/special/2018/05/09/0600/dokumentar/strommekuppet/data/documentation/NTNU-
rapport_til_publisering.pdf)

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Zitrax
Getting: 403 Forbidden

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CornishPasty
It doesn't like the HN referrer, if you request it manually it works

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gnud
Just some context:

DN is a financial newspaper in Norway, pretty important and trusted, if
slanted towards "business" points of view.

NTNU is the second biggest university in Norway, focuses on science, and is
well-regarded.

DN somehow aquired some files that purports to be logs of songs played in
Tidal. The numbers in those logs seems to match up with other reported
numbers, but Tidal denies the logs are genuine.

Researchers at NTNU analyzed the logs, and found that if they are genuine,
then data was manipulated to boost play numbers for Kanye West's and and
Beyonce's albums.

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dhimes
More context: Tidal is a music streaming website.

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scarface74
The only English language article I could find about it.

[https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/did-tidal-falsify-
str...](https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/did-tidal-falsify-streams-to-
bulk-up-kanye-west-and-beyonce-numbers/)

I'm surprised this isn't bigger news if it is true.

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antonp
> Another TIDAL subscriber, music critic Geir Rakvaag, supposedly played
> tracks from Kanye West’s The Life Of Pablo 96 times in a single day – with
> 54 plays in the middle of the night.

>“It’s physically impossible,” he says.

>The list goes on.

The sql query that generated all those fake listens shouldn't have passed QA.
/s

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simias
Is he using "physically impossible" for emphasis or is it really physically
impossible for him to have listened to the track 96 times in a day? Because
according to Wikipedia the longest track on that album is "No More Parties in
LA" whose duration is 6:14 so it would take just under 10 hours to play it 96
times in a row. If you use shorter tracks and depending how short a play
should be to count (I assume you don't have to listen from start to finish to
count?) you could be done much faster. "I Love Kanye" is only 44 second long
for instance. I wouldn't be surprised if some die-hard Kanye West fans had
listened to more than 96 of his tracks in a day.

What if he simply put the album on repeat and left it running somewhere by
mistake? There are 20 tracks in the album for a total length of 66:39, on
repeat you'll rich 96 tracks played in a little over 5 hours. It doesn't sound
implausible if it plays in the background while doing chores or other things.
That would explain the plays during the night as well if he left it running on
a muted computer.

Not that it invalidates the rest of the study or that it would surprise me if
somebody had tinkered with the numbers, I just thought that it was a bit
sloppy to use "physically impossible" when it's just "unlikely".

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noxToken
This is plausible in either direction.

I once turned down the volume for a streaming service one evening probably to
talk to a friend. The playlist played through the night and well into the next
evening. Depending on the playlist, some tracks could have gotten 15+ plays
due to absent-mindedness.

I can definitely see a music critic putting together short playlists (e.g. 3
songs) for work on a specific album, article, or project. 3 songs at 3.5
minutes each in a playlist would take 10.5 minutes to play and loop 5.714 per
hour. You could get 96 plays out of all 3 tracks by continuously looping the
playlist 16.8 times.

Again, I'm not saying the numbers _aren 't_ inflated, but it's possible for
some of these to be false-positives.

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punnerud
The technical report from NTNU (PDF in English):
[https://www.dn.no/staticprojects/special/2018/05/09/0600/dok...](https://www.dn.no/staticprojects/special/2018/05/09/0600/dokumentar/strommekuppet/data/documentation/NTNU-
rapport_til_publisering.pdf)

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dandare
Tangential: Google's recently released Duplex claims to mimic natural
conversation, yet there is not a single translation service that does not
sound like a village idiot.

> "Several Tidal customers who have been confronted with these logs pretend to
> have played songs by the artists as many times as illuminated."

Is translation so much harder, or simply not a priority, or are all the claims
about neural networks and language processing exaggerated?

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icebraining
Duplex works because it's limited to a very specific domain. NLP has been
working very well in those cases for decades:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17028731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17028731)

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lifeisstillgood
So it looks like someone somewhere made up numbers of played tracks, which
were then passed on through the system as gospel

And ... I am not sure now what. There is a online radio station thing (tidal)
that has dishonest numbers.

But why would you trust those numbers outside of tidal unless you had some
independnat verification ?

Is there any such independnat verification of say Apple store downloads ?

If not how do we solve both problems?

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punnerud
DN have «verified» the data by matching payments from Tidal to music companies

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lifeisstillgood
Yes, I am not disputing that they lied. What interests me is that we have so
many unverified, and unverifiable sources of truth. If Apple just turned round
and said "whoops, we were off by 2% for the past 5 years", would we know? If
it was off by 200% there would be a lot of rumours and questions, but 2, 5,
10%?

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some1else
Notice how kanyewest.com loads some analytics scripts multiple times. I think
inflating stats might be part of "the game". Like renting expensive things for
videos used to.

