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Comment by mootothemax | Hacker News Reader

Isn't there potential here for a much more nefarious plan than merely earning revenue from fake listens?

If you could do the same thing across a few services, spreading the number listens out on a viral pattern, based on a bit of investment in highly marketable songs, it sounds like you could create a bedroom-singer rags-to-riches superstar story and potentially make millions upon millions.

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YouTube has had this problem, with people buying and selling video views. I remember that at one point YT did a sweep to remove fake views and quite a few videos uploaded by professional music studios did in fact drop a lot of views all at once. Whether they were actually purchasing views or whether they were innocent is an interesting question.

Anyway I wouldn't worry. De-spamming websites is a well understood problem by this point. Spotify can build an anti-fraud team if such practices become widespread.

A similar thing has happened in the past:

>> "Gracia was selected to represented [sic] Germany in the Eurovision Song Contest with the song "Run & Hide", produced and composed by David Brandes. After the German national pre-selection for the Eurovision Song Contest it was revealed that Brandes had bought thousands of his own CDs to ensure chart placement, a requirement of the ESC"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracia_Baur

Instead of that pedantic "sic" you could have, you know, fixed the article.

Can you really call it a direct wrote at that point? [sic] is an accepted way to avoid integrity issues when quoting.

Oh this is a common way to get on the NY Times Bestsellers List. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Best_Seller...

I think it's pretty well-known that it's an industry-standard practice.

Also another point why I treat big classes of businesses as made of greedy dishonest bastards.

See also: astroturfing, which is commonly accepted way of being a cheat on the Internet.

Yes, I think you're on point with how the exploit could work. Just as reference, I do think the notion of "payola" is similar in practice - using avenues to represent an organic growth of interest, but achieved through alternate means.

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