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Comment by pud | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> "actually stealing"

A lot of people throw those words around in this industry. Here's another case of "actual theft" I worry about.

If I'm the only fan of an indie band, and I use my spotify subscription to stream that band a few times a day and nothing else, Spotify's algorithm promptly takes my $10 and uses it to pay more widely popular artists, to attract Taylors to the service.

In the loose way you used it, Spotify is "actually stealing" from both me and the indie band I love. That seems at least as accurate as saying that someone simply following the terrible rules Spotify made is stealing.

It's like if I put a sign saying "free donuts" in my office, with a donation jar. If no one donates, can I have everyone arrested? Or should I have put up a sign that says "Donuts: $1."

I wouldn't be so hard on Spotify if there was no simple way they could adjust their rules to fix the entire situation. But there is. They could just allocate each person's subscription across the songs that subscriber streamed. If there's a pocket of indie music with hardcore fans, that indie music would get fair compensation, as opposed to funding megastars. Spam would have no reason to exist.

Hat tip to Litost's link: http://markgoldenstein.com/spotify-others-use-unfair-formula...

"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.

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.

I can't help but think that there's no difference between good streams and bad streams. The system should automatically track and handle abuse so that it's not possible; as soon as you say things like the purpose of this or that tracklisting is fraudulent whereas another selection isn't and you've sort of lost me. I also can't help that this whole model - of artists getting fuck all money from their music being streamed - is going to end up where it belongs, in the toilet, eventually and the internet will be used to allow the creators to profit by selling their stuff directly to the consumers without all the suits, parasites and hangers-on taking their cut.

Surely if all the bad streams are coming from the same small number of accounts, or maybe many accounts that don't pay much/any subscription, this problem is simply neutralised by rejigging the payout formula?

Assuming this is still the case: http://markgoldenstein.com/spotify-others-use-unfair-formula...

then by calculating revenue more fairly as per the formula in the above link the problem goes away.

e.g. Instead of calculating the amount an artist gets as total revenue * (their plays / total plays) it was individual account revenue * (their plays / total plays) summed over all accounts. This would then penalise the gym/bar or bot accounts, that either aren't paying any money or are generating huge numbers of plays.

Though, cynically you could probably say there's a reason the formula has been done that way so it would be unlikely to change???

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