The Bands and the Fans Were Fake. The $10M Was Real | Hacker News Reader

The Bands and the Fans Were Fake. The $10M Was Real

nytimes.com

30 pointscainxinth20 comments

> The man, Michael Smith, 52, was accused in a federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday of stealing royalty payments from digital streaming platforms for seven years. Mr. Smith, a flesh-and-blood musician, produced A.I.-generated music and played it billions of times using bots he had programmed, according to the indictment.

Fascinating. Comments in the OP (presently 18) question whether Smith’s scheme is illegal or merely an unethical exploitation of a loophole.

One commenter raises the point that humans are coerced into producing meaningless content only to be exploited by large corporations. Other commenters question whether streams need be listened to by humans at all.

What if the stream is being “listened” to by an algorithm or as training data for a neural network? What if the stream is being played to people engaged in other tasks or to pre-verbal children, to people in their sleep?

What qualifies a stream to be non-fraudulent?

>One commenter raises the point that humans are coerced into producing meaningless content only to be exploited by large corporations.

Shouldn't the prosecutors take action against this? This trend has caused considerably much damage to the various entertainment industries, it is absolutely destroying their profit margins, and putting people out of work.

I think they will argue that intent matters. This was clearly intent to defraud for personal enrichment.

My bet is he will get convicted.

With the way that most of these algorithms use views/clicks/listens to promote the material, this could have been an attempt to find an actual human market.

It might have been, but he was likely violating the usage agreement, and even if he hadn’t been directly profiting from the scheme, he was running the equivalent of a unsuccessful DDoS attack.

Like in many fraud cases, it seems kinda beyond the point to inspect technical equivalencies here. The core reason this was fraud is that he went out of his way to deceive the platforms about what he was doing, because he knew that they wouldn't pay him if not for his misinformation about the identity of the artists or the location of the listening bots.

Sounds like many big YouTubers. The difference is they usually do find an audience and then they can cool off with the bots. The intent is there but in the end the corporation ends up benefiting from the fraud.

I'll bite. How does Spotify benefit from paying $10m to an artist that few people have heard of/listen to?

Easy, by using that engagement to attract 100m more users over 7 years (and I may be conservative here, since apparently they have 600m users in 2024). Which over that time will make them more than $10m, directly and indirectly. It's pretty much the Dead Internet theory fully realized.

Also, If this artist was making that much imagine how much Spotify was making on their natural cut.

What engagement? The artist and the streams were all faked by one person.

That's going to convince 100M more people to sign up?

Fake engagement attracts real engagement. It's a very classic strategy to "grow quickly", because users see a content creator has, say 1-10k subs and they'll be more inclined to view/listen than to someone with no views/subs. And the algorithm will be more likely to recommend that artist. It's popularity bias.

Clearly this artist didn't build that 100m subscriber base by himself over 7 years, but Spotify itself definitely employed this tactic of botting to increase its popularity. Same idea: "wow Spotify has this many people here? I should try it out!".

Given the number of listens (fraudulently) achieved, I would expect the algorithms to push the music on to other (human) listeners.

This is why every youtuber instructs people to "smash, like, and subscribe" - to game the algo and push their content to others.

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepify

> Sleepify is an album by the American funk band Vulfpeck, released March 2014. The release consists solely of ten roughly 30-second-long tracks of silence. The album was made available on the music streaming service Spotify, where the band encouraged consumers to play the album on a loop while they slept. In turn, royalties from the playing of each track on the "album" were to be used to crowdfund a free concert tour by the band.

They basically took advantage of how Spotify royalty calculation worked and ended up making $20k off of it, which did then get used to fund a small free admission tour of the US.

Guess that explains why Spotify hit hard on white noise over time. Can't advertise to sleeping users (...Yet).

Gift link https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/05/nyregion/nc-man-charged-a...

Fake bands are not a new thing. Of course, that usually meant a real vocalist and real (usually studio) musicians but those songs were still sold for money. If this guy produced songs that people listened is it any different than what came before?

The fake listeners, though, aren't the same thing. Bots don't buy products.

Milli Vanilli comes to mind;

After these details emerged, lawsuits were filed under various U.S. consumer fraud protection laws against Arista Records ... settlement was approved; it refunded those who attended concerts as well as those who bought Milli Vanilli recordings. An estimated 10 million buyers were eligible to claim a refund, and they could keep the refunded recordings.

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

Oddly enough - the guy behind Milli Vanilli (Frank Farian),had done the exact same thing before..He wrote the song 'Rasputin' and then created the lip sync band 'BoneyM' to 'perform' it...

BoneyM went on to have a pretty big career, including "Rivers of Babylon/Brown Girl in the Ring", which was a hit all over Europe, reaching no.1 in several countries as well as becoming one of the biggest selling singles of all time in the UK.

Years after BoneyM, he did the same thing with Milli Vanilli

If it ain't broke, don't fix it ? :-D

1.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Farian

2.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boney_M.

https://archive.is/7o0m9

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