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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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...

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 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).

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 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.

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....

> 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.