Hacker Spoofs Track Plays To Top Music Charts

mask.of.sanity writes "Stand aside P!nk, Niki Minaj; you've just been beaten by a music generator. One Aussie security expert curious about the fraud mechanisms at play on streaming services like Spotify uploaded garbage music tracks and directed three Amazon virtual machines to click the play button 24/7 for a month, earning him top spot in online music charts and $1000 in royalties."

Comments

Beaten by a music generator?

[Sockatume]

I thought that's where the tunes came from in the first place.

Re:Beaten by a music generator?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah me too, but I also like a bit of a variety. It's the same goddamn committee that writes everything, hence everythings sounds the same.

Click fraud is possible! News at 11.

[Joining Yet Again]

This sort of thing is so 1999, however.

These days most sponsors just trust their ad broker to correctly report genuine clicks and withold payment for fraudulent clicks. Because there would be no incentive for an ad broker to under-report genuine clicks, and underreporting by even 100 clicks per sponsor when you have hundreds of thousands of sponsors won't gain you a couple of extra million dollars here and there.

Noun, verb, noun noun verb (or: terrible headline)

[wonkey_monkey]

Hacker (n.) Spoofs (n.? v.?) Track (n.? v.?) Plays (n.? v.?) To (prep.) Top (adj.? v.?) Music (n.) Charts (n.? v.?)

Gaining money

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually earning money by doing that is only possible because of a bad compensation model. Currently they just lump all the money from users into a big pile, and then divide that pile by the percentage amount of how much each artist was played. This screws the smaller artist over, because they get nothing, this leads to them dropping away from these kinds of services eventually.

I pay spotify $5 per month. If I listen to only one artist, that artist should get all my money(minus spotify cut). If I listen to nobody, my money should be divided like it is now. If I listen to 5 different artists, my money should be divided amongst them. That way I would actually support the artists that I like, and not lady gaga and justin bieber and random hackers.

Re:Gaining money

[Anonymous Coward]

Those logs are for the NSA only.

Re:Noun, verb, noun noun verb (or: terrible headli

[wonkey_monkey]

So much so, that it really is impossible to avoid.

Of course it isn't.

Ambiguous:

Prostitues appeal to Pope

Less ambiguous:

Prostitues make appeal to Pope

Could anyone tell the difference?

[damn_registrars]

All he needed to add was some random monologue (preferable to be very angry monologue) and it would fit right in with the top 40.