The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services | Hacker News Reader

The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services

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This seems like a huge problem with online ad supported services in general. I wonder if this sort of thing happens on Apple Music and other for-pay-only services since you'd have to pay to have an account for your bot?

But this is more troubling than it seemed at first to me. Couldn't something like this also happen: So I could put my song on Spotify (or YouTube or any other ad-supported service) and some business can come along and set up a bot to open Spotify and play my tune and several others. Spotify will also play ads and probably show ads on the page during playback because it's not a paid-for account. Now Spotify determines that this stream was sent to a bot. They remove the play counts from my tracks and any others played. Do they return the ad revenue from those ad impressions? If not, what's stopping Spotify from just making up numbers, charging the advertisers and discounting my revenue without there really being a bot stream? How can any of these ad-supported businesses be held accountable? This seems insane.

I'm not saying they're actually doing the above. I assume they are not, but it makes me wonder about how you would even know? It could even happen accidentally due to some error in their software. That seems less than ideal.

I haven't worked in the adtech space in years, but third party counts were a thing from the advertiser side for basically this reason. Nobody trusted the network to say "yep, we showed your ad this many times, pay up."

I'm not sure how fraud detection works there, though. Maybe there's third party counting that includes third party fraud checks? Back then, at least, the incentive to spot fraud wasn't high - advertisers didn't want to admit to their stakeholders that they were wasting their money any more than the adtech network wanted to admit it to the advertiser.

Your scenario is also interesting from the publisher side - especially on non-web properties where a musician doesn't even have the ability to embed their own JS in their song to collect their own counts or use someone else's playcount counting library...

Hope you find my Medium post thought provoking.

Incentives in the music industry are setup such that any company offering promotional services to artists (ad agency, PR firm, promoter, radio promo, marketing department, etc) can quietly go to fiverr.com, buy 100,000 bot streams for $20, then take credit for their client’s rise in popularity—-getting the artist to pay again.

Which, because of how streaming services pay, steals from artists who have real/organic streams.

Are there any music curating channels on YT or elsewhere that can filter through that mess? I guess the challenge there is keeping the curator honest and not 'sponsored'

I'd like fixed price per play to get replaced by something closer to splitting a users subscription fees based on the time they spent listening to a particular song/artist.

this 100%

I might be wrong but I think Youtube Premium uses that pricing model. At least their FAQ seems to imply that's what's going on: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276?hl=en

https://resonate.is/ has a stream-to-own model

Exactly this - https://www.deezer.com/ucps ("User-Centric Payment System"). To my knowledge Deezer hasn't (yet?) implemented this model.

It's weird to me that a large share of my spotify monthly fees go to Ed Sheeran and Drake and Taylor Swift even though I literally have never streamed them, and almost none of my monthly fee goes towards the artist that I stream all the time.

The whole premise of the way streaming music is marketed and sold is all wrong. In the long term if you want good music to be created you have to put a little thought into how you’re nurturing the community of musicians on the local level who are doing the hard work of creating the product that Spotify and iTunes are selling.

From the point of view of a streaming service, it looks like this:

1) music is generated from bands via spontaneous generation

2) we throw that music up on a streaming site without context or support unless paid by major labels

3) profit

That’s not how it works. Good music is usually developed in some context- a community of musicians will develop in some major city in a location where the rent is not too high. They go to each other’s shows, they support each other, they learn from each other, they imitate each other and develop new sounds. Once in a while one group becomes popular enough that people outside of that community start to hear about them.

But, just as Facebook has become a news aggregator and should probably take that responsibility seriously, iTunes should take its responsibility seriously to the musical community that generates the product it sells. It could start recommending to people bands that are local to them- who they could go see live. It could tie in promoting live experiences of the bands a user is listening to. They could redistribute the streaming profits a little to give some financial support to smaller artists instead of the top 10 bands who play on a loop at Applebee’s. There are lots of ways that they could foster the growth of musical communities, and they aren’t doing it.

One good thing about the old music industry was that they would at least somewhat do this for struggling bands- they would identify talent, and develop and promote it. iTunes doesn’t do that. Spotify doesn’t do that. A lot of talent is going to wither on the vine without support.

As with food delivery and "ghost kitchens" the next step for streaming services seems to be "ghost bands"[1] that produce unobjectionable music meant to fill playlists for smaller royalties than a "normal" band.

Both of these trends put traditionally local restaurants and small bands under increased pressure to compete with the likes of VC-funded Spotify or DoorDash. The pessimist in me sees a future where these local business are largely gone, kind of like how Walmart and other big box stores replaced many small, local retailers.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15961416/spotify-fake-art...

Spotify is already starting a promotion service where artists get boosted by giving spotify a cut of the already minuscule royalties. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/nov/03/spotify-a...

Spotify also has a relationship with Sony's Flow Machines AI music project.

Shall we try to guess why?

Conversely, a kid in a basement with a laptop can for $20 via distrokid be listed on Spotify and be discovered within non-geographic communities.

It’s not all bad, but these are cool ideas.

I don't have hard data, but from listening to interviews with musicians it seems to me like the difference is that the power distribution has become even more skewed. For every star discovered on Spotify you used to have 10 bands that could at least eke out a middle class living in their city/state touring and selling albums.

I suppose, economically this might be an example of an externality? Seems like a lot of industries are piling up externalities right now in terms of their effects on society, wages, political discourse, the environment, etc..

I agree. For a small artist, With streaming coming in with tens of thousands of songs per day [1] but the proceeds go not from me who is paying to the artist I play songs from, but to some average calculated where the money goes to the big artists, I don’t see this being much better than the piracy that went before it.

[1] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/nearly-40000-tracks-a...

Similar problem, different platform: every time I post music on Soundcloud I get likes and comments from bots that want me to pay for reposts.

They seem to have a huge problem at SC and it’s not clear to me that they have any reason to try to stop it. I have been reporting this behavior for years and from my perspective it hasn’t gotten any better.

I have no evidence for this but it feels like Soundcloud is on life support and they have zero or near-zero developers working on it.

Could be, but big sites are always more able to ignore fraud than I'd hope.

eBay has a "compromised account monetization" bot that has used the exact same distinctive fraudulent listings weekly for years and they still use a manual process to deal with it.

I for one believe a lot of services - also e.g. Twitter, Youtube, etc - don't do much about the bots because they earn revenue from it. Twitter doesn't care if an ad impression is from a bot, they will get paid for it anyway - until the advertisers decide to pull out of course. I'm sure they are constantly trying to walk the line between too many and not enough bot activity.

I mean with email, spambots are always a net negative because the services that pass e-mails through do not get paid for them. But Twitter does. If you get a bot tweet on your feed, or a bot-promoted one, you engage with it and Twitter gets paid (in 'engagement', the magical currency).

I chose bandcamp over soundcloud because I don't have face tattoos, but that kind of judginess really just covers for risk aversion and perfectionistic failure chasing. I may switch based on the rationale that a product is only as good as it needs to be and crapiness that persists can be a leading indicator of growth. While bandcamp is earnest and comfortable for the kind of stuff I do (just a place to share with friends), it may be a bit too cool for school if I actually ended up producing something people want.

Soundcloud really looked like they were growing faster than their ability to handle it. Thinking it may actually be the smarter play.

They are entirely different products. Bandcamp is a digital storefront and SoundCloud is audio social media.

On a related note, their business models are completely different. Bandcamp is bootstrapped and profitable, while SoundCloud is dependent on investment money and almost went bankrupt a few years ago.

> They are entirely different products.

Well, if you have to say it...

Was going through both of them again, and curation-wise, they're both landfills. At least on bandcamp I can search for genre/city, but for say, electronic music, you have to sift through stuff that is literally disgusting to find the gems. It's when they mix things that aren't meant to be mixed, they create that kind of dread. Good for bandcamp being profitable though, that's very good news. I'm probably just not their target market.

Bandcamp is a way to enable your existing fans to support you. They don’t really have the popularity contest or “discovery mechanisms” over there.

Soundcloud is a radio and Bandcamp is a CD shop, if you like a retro metaphor. One is Instagram, the other is Shopify. Apples and oranges. Find new fans through Soundcloud and Spotify, sell your work through Bandcamp.

> I have no evidence for this but it feels like Soundcloud is on life support and they have zero or near-zero developers working on it.

Well they have been teetering on the brink of collapse for a long time, so no, I wouldn't expect them to have tons of resources. I'm surprised they're still around to be honest.

With regards to SoundCloud's future, their revenue is growing, they're profitable, and they've recently raised. I'm also one of the developers working on it. Can't speak to fraud as it's not my area + NDA, but earnestly, thank you for reporting what you see.

Source: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/soundcloud-revenues-s....

Interesting! Sounds like the company is doing pretty well, that's nice to hear. I'm a fan of it, just wish there were fewer bots. Thanks for your work, whatever you're doing there :)

On the opposite side, I’ve wondered if Apple Music purposefully attempts to play music with lower licensing cost when possible.

For example, if you ask for a particular classic song, and some newer cover is available, Apple Music will play the cover. Sometimes you must specifically ask for the song by the original artists name.

I have gotten this vibe in some “curated” playlists as well.

Could also just be bad algorithms, however since Apple Music “For You” has felt very payolla-y in the past I would not be surprised if the company used tricks anywhere it could to increase margins on the Music service.

This is why I gave up on Pandora. Good music for 20 minutes then unrecognizable pablum after that.

So nefarious people could potentially DDoS artists they don’t like using bot plays to get their tracks removed. I can’t think of a real economic reason to do that besides perhaps offering the only cover version of a popular on Spotify that gets removed, which would juice your own plays.

In the same way nefarious people can also DDoS Twitter and Instagram accounts with fake follows to get accounts suspended.

This is the thing I don't like on Soundcloud. Whenever I upload there some low effort cat-walking-on-keyboard stuff, some bot came around with: "Hey, this is so cool song. We can promote it..."

So many scams are targeted to musicians.

Are artists necessarily innocent in this scenario, or are they totally fine with artificial streams to boost discoverability via Spotify's recommendation algorithms?

ad people hate it when they become useless

american companies still hate the success of spotify

the music industry is bad

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