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AI-powered music scam nets musician $10M in royalties–and federal charges
- pohl 2y agoI’m trying to muster sympathy for someone who tried to make a quick buck putting garbage into the world, but I just can’t get there.
- blitzar 2y agoHe extracted the money from parasites. We tolerate, even celebrate, radiation poisoning when it is killing cancer cells and allowing a person to live.
- BigParm 2y agoI love when corpos get scammed or stolen from. They know that the game is "take what you can" and it's about time the plebs learned that too.
- zaptrem 2y agoStreaming royalties are paid from a (majority) portion of subscription revenue. They didn’t steal from Spotify, they stole from musicians. In a way, the same tends to be true whenever people take from “corpos.” That money ultimately comes from people in some form.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoNo, they mostly stole from Spotify, then fron the top 100 distributors. Then the artists maybe lost pennies on this scheme. Worst part is that Spotify gained a lot more than 10m from letting this go on for 7 years. I doubt they weren't aware of this, but allowed it becsuse those bots let them attract a lot more than $10m worth of viewers. That's why I have no sympathy.
- zaptrem 2y agoCan you provide any reasoning or evidence for this beyond “No, you’re wrong?” Here’s mine: “ Unlike physical sales or downloads, which pay artists a fixed price per song or album sold, Spotify pays royalties based on the artist's "market share"—the number of streams for their songs as a proportion of total songs streamed on the service. Spotify distributes approximately 70% of its total revenue to rights holders, who then pay artists based on their individual agreements. ” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Spotify https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Spotify Spotify didn’t make a single cent less than they usually do because of this.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoReasoning: this happened for 7 years. And I'd be shocked if no one was actually privy of this happening years prior. Like every other 2010's tech operation, bots can be used to attract real users, at which point the bots can be sunsetted a bit and then attract real investors. market capture was more important then profitability in the 2010's, so even if they lost money from this overall, they gained something much more important for a company: a brand. That brand is where you start to become "too big to fail". This is basically a 3rd party helping with the first step. If you want to look at raw revenue over 7 years, maybe Spotify made less. But they definitely profitted by time by allowing it to go on until it was not longer useful (especially now. As Spotify is using music to train their own AI models. Ai generated music will just mess up the model). ---------------- Do I have any hard evidence Spotify specifically does this? Not on hand, but I wouldn't be surprised if I can actually dig up Spotify dirt. This is documented for several other large scale tech companies. I'd honestly be surprised if Spotify was a special case. I hope that explanation suffices, or is at least more satifactory than what you interpreted as "no, you're wrong".
- zaptrem 2y agoWhile I expected you to try to explain how the scammers "mostly stole from Spotify," (which was the claim I disagreed with) you instead put forth a theory to how their scam instead benefited Spotify (which I never made any claims about, nor disputed your claims). Can you explain how they stole from Spotify if the revenue pool they stole from (70% royalty pool) would never have gone to Spotify in the first place?
- _yb2s 2y agoSpotify isn't a parasite... it is an amazing service that connects listeners with musicians, and has excellent methods to help people discover new music they will likely enjoy. It pays artists little because it charges users little- so anyone can afford to listen to music, but unlike the radio or pirating, their listen actually sends money to the artist. I've discovered, and become a concert ticket buying fan of a huge number of small time artists that would have been nearly impossible to find or listen to without spotify. No artist is forced to list songs on spotify, if a non-spotify method worked better for them to get fans and income, they don't need to put songs on there- yet I find most artists do have their music on there.
- FireBeyond 2y ago> It pays artists little because it charges users little And yet services like Tidal can afford to pay artists 4-6 times more for the same amount of streaming.
- _yb2s 2y agoI don't find that surprising. I did a free trial of Tidal and only found about 1/10th of the artists I like on there, so for the same subscription fee I either listened to music a lot less, or listened to the same artists and songs a lot more. Either way, that is a much bigger fraction of my subscription fees for each individual artist. I loved the software and high audio quality, but it just wasn't usable because it didn't have the music I wanted to listen to. From what I've heard, about 70% of a Spotify subscription pays directly for content to the rights holders, and it is mostly distributed in proportion to 'listens.' This does mean that most of the money goes to a tiny number of extremely popular artists, but that seems more like a social dynamic that always existed with pop music, and not Spotify's fault.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago>This does mean that most of the money goes to a tiny number of extremely popular artists, but that seems more like a social dynamic that always existed with pop music, and not Spotify's fault. And society. Oh well, billionaires are just a social dynamic. Can't all be rich, best to just accept being poor as rent rises.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 6510 2y agoI need to hear the music first.
- CamperBob2 2y agoExactly. Let's hear what HAL's got. I listen to a lot of EDM on Spotify while working, and nobody has ever accused me of tasteful discernment when it comes to music. I suspect it's only a matter of time before I 'like' an AI-composed song that no one else has ever heard before, after a bot uploads it automatically as part of some kind of scam and Spotify recommends it based on my previous likes. Borges more-or-less said this would happen, so when it does, I won't be able to say I wasn't warned.
- brcmthrowaway 2y agoWhat EDM
- CamperBob2 2y agohttps://open.spotify.com/playlist/09VAxTzh4aIiePrxfQ8BLw?si=7d67c545d63440a4 https://open.spotify.com/playlist/09VAxTzh4aIiePrxfQ8BLw?si=...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jsheard 2y agoThe buried lede is that he was botting fake listeners on his songs to fraudulently boost his payouts, which was the illegal part. Just spamming Spotify with AI dreck and hoping that real people listened to it would have been (legally) fine, but not as lucrative.
- sickofparadox 2y agoThe real strategy is to put it all in a number of playlists then use AI/cheap promo accounts to promote them on search engines and social media.
- linkjuice4all 2y agoDon’t let the entertainment business find out - they might just start doing that.
- blitzar 2y agoSounds like the formula for pop idol.
- drcongo 2y agoHonest question: what makes the botting illegal? Wouldn't it just be a ToS violation?
- curtisblaine 2y agoThe article doesn't explain how this is fraud. He must have done something else, because I can't see how streaming AI-generated songs is a fraud.
- jsheard 2y agoHe was doing the streaming equivalent of click fraud, streaming his own songs to run up the numbers. The songs being AI generated is an incidental detail.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Gualdrapo 2y ago> Smith used artist names like "Callous Post" and "Calorie Screams," while their songs included titles such as "Zygotic Washstands" and "Zymotechnical." I mean, those sound like pretty rad names for punk bands and punk songs. Hadn't heard such original names since Seth Putnam left us.
- miohtama 2y ago> Smith's scheme, which prosecutors say ran for seven years, involved creating thousands of fake streaming accounts using purchased email addresses. Despite the title, there is little AI in here. The automatically generated music barely existed seven years ago. It really does not matter what noise you upload to these services, as it is not really validated. It’s just bots streaming your songs, like you can have bots viewing your website for ad impressions.
- fnordpiglet 2y agoAI = anything to do with computers now for people with journalism degrees
- itronitron 2y agoIf a bot listens to an audio stream but it doesn't have any ears does the audio make a sound?
- lobsterthief 2y agoOnly if the bot ingested it to train an LLM, which was then used to create other AGI music, which then reached human ears.
- jzb 2y agoLooking at the figures, this means that a band would need to have more than 120,000 plays daily to earn the equivalent of $15 an hour for a 40-hour week. (If my back-of-the-napkin math is correct based on the article saying that 661,400 plays daily earned a potential $3,307.20.) I've little sympathy for Spotify and the rest _but_ this scheme -- if I understand how Spotify pays out -- reduces payouts to other folks. I don't know if society is well-served by sending him to prison, but he should definitely be penalized somehow until that money, plus damages, is redirected to actual artists.
- blitzar 2y ago120,000 extra plays a day would have increased the revenue of the streaming platform via played advertisements. The increased revenue pool in theory means that other artists were unaffected, Spotify made extra money, the fraudulent artist made extra money and the advertisers lost money. This is probably why they waited 7 years and till they had IPO'd to pull the plug.
- jzb 2y agoWhat is the split between ad revenue vs. subscriber revenue? When I used Spotify I was a subscriber so they got one flat fee from me per month that didn't increase no matter how many times I played a song.
- para_parolu 2y agoI thought spotify pays per time listening. This way users pick who gets money
- gen3 2y agoNo, spotify (and most other services) build a pool of money for payouts. That money is then divided among all artists based on their % share of all plays for the month
- unnamed76ri 2y ago
- paulpauper 2y agolooks like he had the technical chops for a career in tech. would he have earned millions? Maybe not but it would be honest work.
- dskrvk 2y agoHe didn’t generate the music himself, and likely worked with others on setting up the bots (the article mentions co-conspirators). On the song generation: > This led Smith to pivot to AI-generated music in 2018 when he partnered with an as-yet-unnamed AI music company CEO and a music promoter to create a large library of computer-generated songs. The district attorney announcement did not specify precisely what method Smith used to generate the songs. I wonder what company he used and whether they can be liable too.
- paulpauper 2y agoHe shudda done those youtube fake elon/space-x livestream things on youtube. Those people make easily hundreds of thousands of dollars per video of BTC, and years later afik no arrests or action by feds. Apparently there is some legal loophole in which this crime is ignored or under the radar. As it's said, never steal from the rich.
- IG_Semmelweiss 2y agoIs it possible to listen to music for free on spotify, for 7 years ? That's the only way I can see this scheme working. But it seems odd to me that spotify would not put substantial walls up to validate new users, to prevent what is effectively musical adclick fraud.
- blitzar 2y agoIt pushes up their DAU metric.
- CamperBob2 2y agoExactly. It would be like Reddit launching a campaign against fake users... the ones they created themselves to bootstrap engagement.
- geor9e 2y agoReminds me of when I was 11 and pasted stolen nintendo 64 content on geocities until I was earning $10 a month checks, then I got greedy and learned javascript to click my own banners every second 24/7 but somehow they caught on and my business empire all came crumbling down
- CamperBob2 2y agoI gotta ask what lessons you took away from that experience.
- geor9e 2y agoIt was probably good to get "caught" once with no real consequences, so I wouldn't grow up to try it at the $10M level. I abandoned that N64 website soon after, but a decade or two later I got an email from a stranger, thanking me for hosting the forums that were a huge part of her growing up, where she made lifelong friends, etc. The thing was, I forgot I even made a forum. Few used it at the time I abandoned it. It was only accessible via my N64 website, but the back end was hosted by a third party forum service, so they must have moderated it all those years. It felt like that episode of the Simpsons where Lisa discovers a civilization in her petri dish.
- scottiebarnes 2y agoThis is like a rite of passage for young early web devs. Click the banners till you get banned.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago> used AI to create hundreds of thousands of fake songs by nonexistent bands, then streamed them using bots to collect royalties from platforms Not a lawyer but I don't see how this is "fraud" or a "scam". He created actual music, which people listened to, and by listening to them, generated royalties. The fact that he could use AI to create hundreds of thousands of different songs is a problem for the music industry, but that's an AI problem in general (art, writing, etc.) Ah, OK, I see the problem further down in the article. This was the illegal part: > involved creating thousands of fake streaming accounts using purchased email addresses. He developed software to play his AI-generated music on repeat from various computers, mimicking individual listeners from different locations
- ffitch 2y agoFor that to work Spotify should pay the artist more than it gets from the listeners (bots) who play author’s music. I doubt that’s the case though. Did bots raise track popularity and money was coming from legit listeners? Or did the money come from the advertisers?
- insane_dreamer 2y ago> In a 2017 email to himself, Smith calculated ....; in an email earlier this year, he boasted ... For someone smart enough to create bot listeners, it's weird that he wasn't smart enough to not write emails about it :/
- autoexec 2y agoIf he hadn't been so greedy he likely could have stopped after making a few million and retired without ever being caught.
- spacebacon 2y agoAI tends to master these creations. If a song is mastered it’s likely documented who mastered it. This could birth a music industry fueled authentication service in the future.