4 ms·

What was the fraud? Not listening to the ads? I guess he wasted bandwidth. The fraudulent behaviour is on the part of the streamers. There should be no cross u

What was the fraud? Not listening to the ads? I guess he wasted bandwidth. The fraudulent behaviour is on the part of the streamers. There should be no cross user account royalty dependecy.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
skobes 2y ago
He used bots and fake accounts to stream his own songs, thereby dishonestly profiting. The AI is not really relevant except that it made the crime harder to detect.
Cheer2171 2y ago
> The fraudulent behaviour is on the part of the streamers. He was also coordinating the botnet streamers. From the first sentence of the first paragraph of TFA: > a scheme to create hundreds of thousands of songs with artificial intelligence and use automated programs called “bots” to stream the AI-generated songs billions of times.
- Cheer2171 2y ago
  On a completely unrelated note, I call for the repeal of the HN rule that forbids me from calling out commenters for having not read the first sentence of the first paragraph of the fine article. rightbyte, your laziness contributes nothing to this forum and it would be better if you deleted your account. Your comment was bad and you should feel bad.
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    Come on. It is not an article and I have read it. My point is that I see the streaming payout scheme as fraudulent. It is a block box 'trust me bro'. Clearly, it is possible to abuse it and the streamers want to be the ones doing it. I understand perfectly well what the FBI and music industry think is the fraud. They wanted some other label to have the money.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
miki123211 2y ago
There has to be a cross-user dependency. There are 3 ways you can go about paying artists. Way 1 is to say that x% of what you pay goes to the artists and that the streaming service takes the rest, no matter how many songs you play. This makes no sense; this would cause a Taylor Swift fan that listens to her for hours on end, but also listens to other music sometimes, to pay less to Swift than somebody who just plays one Swift song per month and nothing else. Way 2 is to pay a set amount per play, but make sure that the amount is low enough that if you play music for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the payouts are still less than what you paid for the service. Most people don't listen to music for that long, so this makes artist payouts unrealistically low. Way 3, which is what services actually do, is to have a much higher per-play rate and assume that users listen to n songs a month on average. There will be some users who listen to a lot more, and you will take the loss on them, but by the law of large numbers, you will make an overall profit. This is predicated on the fact that nobody "cheats" the service and misrepresents how much music they've been listening to. If you fraudulently tell Spotify that you've listened to your own songs 10m times this month, you make a lot of money.
- madisp 2y ago
  afaik Spotify does none of those ways. They take the total amount of money earned per time period and divide it to artists based on the total_artist_playcount / total_playcount in that time period, after taking their own percentage cut. It's closest to Way 1, with the difference that you can listen to whatever - if Taylor Swift is the most popular artist right now and gets, say, 1% of all plays then 1% of your subscription will go to Swift.
- grujicd 2y ago
  > Way 3, which is what services actually do, is to have a much higher per-play rate and assume that users listen to n songs a month on average. What's your source of this? I thought that all money is pooled, and then divided by total play statistics - i.e. actually numbers, not assumed values based on some guessing in advance as you suggest. That would make their business super risky. Imagine there's a holiday season and everyone listens double the usual amount. That could bankrupt a streaming company. Also, their incentives would be to discourage users of playing music, and we don't see any evidence of it. > Way 1 is to say that x% of what you pay goes to the artists and that the streaming service takes the rest, no matter how many songs you play. > This makes no sense; this would cause a Taylor Swift fan that listens to her for hours on end, but also listens to other music sometimes, to pay less to Swift than somebody who just plays one Swift song per month and nothing else. This makes total sense for me as a consumer - I want my money to go exactly to the artists I'm listening to. I don't want any of my money to go to Taylor Swift or any other artist I don't care about. There are several benefits to this model: - it would benefit small niche artists who have couple hundreds devoted fans. Maybe it would make it possible for some of them to live off the streaming, instead of getting pennies. It would reduce payouts to super starts, but I don't care about that since I'm the one who's paying and I vastly prefer that my money goes to who I want - it would be inherently more fair than the existing model - it would absolutely eliminate any kind of fraud as described here. You won't be able to invest $100 and receive $200 by manipulating numbers, you could only receive $100 - streaming fees

What was the fraud? Not listening to the ads? I guess he wasted bandwidth. The fraudulent behaviour is on the part of the streamers. There should be no cross user account royalty dependecy.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

skobes 2y ago

He used bots and fake accounts to stream his own songs, thereby dishonestly profiting. The AI is not really relevant except that it made the crime harder to detect.

Cheer2171 2y ago

> The fraudulent behaviour is on the part of the streamers. He was also coordinating the botnet streamers. From the first sentence of the first paragraph of TFA: > a scheme to create hundreds of thousands of songs with artificial intelligence and use automated programs called “bots” to stream the AI-generated songs billions of times.

Cheer2171 2y ago
On a completely unrelated note, I call for the repeal of the HN rule that forbids me from calling out commenters for having not read the first sentence of the first paragraph of the fine article. rightbyte, your laziness contributes nothing to this forum and it would be better if you deleted your account. Your comment was bad and you should feel bad.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  Come on. It is not an article and I have read it. My point is that I see the streaming payout scheme as fraudulent. It is a block box 'trust me bro'. Clearly, it is possible to abuse it and the streamers want to be the ones doing it. I understand perfectly well what the FBI and music industry think is the fraud. They wanted some other label to have the money.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

miki123211 2y ago

There has to be a cross-user dependency. There are 3 ways you can go about paying artists. Way 1 is to say that x% of what you pay goes to the artists and that the streaming service takes the rest, no matter how many songs you play. This makes no sense; this would cause a Taylor Swift fan that listens to her for hours on end, but also listens to other music sometimes, to pay less to Swift than somebody who just plays one Swift song per month and nothing else. Way 2 is to pay a set amount per play, but make sure that the amount is low enough that if you play music for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the payouts are still less than what you paid for the service. Most people don't listen to music for that long, so this makes artist payouts unrealistically low. Way 3, which is what services actually do, is to have a much higher per-play rate and assume that users listen to n songs a month on average. There will be some users who listen to a lot more, and you will take the loss on them, but by the law of large numbers, you will make an overall profit. This is predicated on the fact that nobody "cheats" the service and misrepresents how much music they've been listening to. If you fraudulently tell Spotify that you've listened to your own songs 10m times this month, you make a lot of money.

madisp 2y ago
afaik Spotify does none of those ways. They take the total amount of money earned per time period and divide it to artists based on the total_artist_playcount / total_playcount in that time period, after taking their own percentage cut. It's closest to Way 1, with the difference that you can listen to whatever - if Taylor Swift is the most popular artist right now and gets, say, 1% of all plays then 1% of your subscription will go to Swift.
grujicd 2y ago
> Way 3, which is what services actually do, is to have a much higher per-play rate and assume that users listen to n songs a month on average. What's your source of this? I thought that all money is pooled, and then divided by total play statistics - i.e. actually numbers, not assumed values based on some guessing in advance as you suggest. That would make their business super risky. Imagine there's a holiday season and everyone listens double the usual amount. That could bankrupt a streaming company. Also, their incentives would be to discourage users of playing music, and we don't see any evidence of it. > Way 1 is to say that x% of what you pay goes to the artists and that the streaming service takes the rest, no matter how many songs you play. > This makes no sense; this would cause a Taylor Swift fan that listens to her for hours on end, but also listens to other music sometimes, to pay less to Swift than somebody who just plays one Swift song per month and nothing else. This makes total sense for me as a consumer - I want my money to go exactly to the artists I'm listening to. I don't want any of my money to go to Taylor Swift or any other artist I don't care about. There are several benefits to this model: - it would benefit small niche artists who have couple hundreds devoted fans. Maybe it would make it possible for some of them to live off the streaming, instead of getting pennies. It would reduce payouts to super starts, but I don't care about that since I'm the one who's paying and I vastly prefer that my money goes to who I want - it would be inherently more fair than the existing model - it would absolutely eliminate any kind of fraud as described here. You won't be able to invest $100 and receive $200 by manipulating numbers, you could only receive $100 - streaming fees