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

Most interesting point

[IamTheRealMike]

The fact that services don't have automated play de-spamming system should not come as a big surprise, given the pathetic earnings available. That's not research worth doing. But the outcome is - just $1000 for a track being played 24/7? No wonder artists all think Spotify is a sick joke. They won't have to automate anti-abuse systems until the amount they're dishing out to artists goes way, way beyond that paltry amount. It's not even worth gaming their charts right now.

Re:Most interesting point

[MiniMike]

The actual amount earned in the study is arbitrary. He could have just as easily set up more virtual machines and multiplied the amount, if those were the only source. Also it's not clear if the payment was only from his clicks, or if it includes clicks from unsuspecting listeners who were drawn by the artificially high rating, so your calculation of 50 cents may be off.

The virtual world once more duplicates the real

[Bruce66423]

Once upon a time it was possible to raise your position in the charts by buying the record in the shops that reported sales, and there was a small industry dedicated to this... Good to see certain traditions haven't been killed by computers!

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

[wonkey_monkey]

Learning (v.? n.?) reading (v.? n.?) comprehension helps too.

Gah!

No issues for me understanding what they meant with that headline. And I'm not even a native English speaker.

Well, good for you. Maybe it helps that you're not a native English speaker, and are less familiar with the alternate meanings of some words. I happen to have a very good handle on the written word, so maybe that's why I'm overly sensitive to these things.

My point is not that the headline is more likely to be misread than read correctly (although I suspect this particular one might be), but that ambiguity can and should be avoided regardless.

Re:Beaten by a music generator?

[Hognoxious]

Would you prefer the committee to sing their own songs or the average singer composing their own songs?

I'd prefer them to all fall off a cliff.

Re:Gaining money

[hairyfish]

Seems odd they they can't adopt your model, I mean they have logs of every song played by which users so it should be trivial to allocate each user's contribution directly to the artists. In fact they could take it a step further and have user charts to see who gave the most money to which artist, then fans could compete with each other to see who is the biggest fan by who pays their favourite artist the most. Then the artist could reward their biggest fans with a phone call or something or a back stage pass. The technology is there to make this work, fans win, the artists win, if only the money grubbers that own the copyrights had more interest in making it work.

Re:Click fraud is possible! News at 11.

[Charliemopps]

You've obviously never worked with Marketing people before. It's just one giant clusterfuck of lies. Marketing has to prove their department is worth keeping so they want to inflate the number of clicks they got just as much as the vendor does. Remember the "Got Milk" campaign? One of the largest and most recognized ad campaigns in history and milk sales went DOWN while it was going on. It did more for the stars that showed up in the adds than it ever did for the milk industry.