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?

[91degrees]

Hi grandpa. I think what you meant to say was "It's just noise! It all sounds the same and I can't understand the lyrics. And get of my damn lawn!"

Re:Beaten by a music generator?

[They'reComingToTakeM]

His name is spelt "Simon Cowell". It's just pronounced ARSE.

Re:Beaten by a music generator?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jim Steinman wrote Meatloaf's best work, but Jim Steinman wasn't twelve people.

Proof that you're wrong:

* "Jim Steinman" is twelve characters.

* Most people in the music industry could be described as "characters".

* Therefore "Jim Steinman" is twelve people in the music industry.

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:Beaten by a music generator?

[realityimpaired]

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

I don't see much advantage in having the composer and the singer being the same person. I care about the final product.

Since the advent of autotune, most pop acts are not chosen for their ability to sing, they're chosen for their ability to look pretty. There aren't a lot of singer/songwriters in *that* genre, but once you get out of it, you'll find the majority of the *really* good stuff is performed by the same person or people who wrote it: performances are more visceral when the performer has an emotional connection with what they're playing.

So you can have your fake plastic people performing fake plastic songs. Personally, I'll avoid the pop music genre, and stick with artists who actually deserve the name.

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.

Re:OMG

[wonkey_monkey]

He can always go back to preventing World War Three.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

$1000 for just three "listeners" playing the songs 24/7 for a month. That's 3*30*24=2160hours, so about 50ct per hour played. 50ct is probably more than the royalties on a single CD which the buyers can play as often as they like. If I had 50ct for every hour someone used my software, I'd be a rich man.

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

[wvmarle]

Learning reading comprehension helps, too. No issues for me understanding what they meant with that headline. And I'm not even a native English speaker.

Now if it were a sentence like "buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo" I'd understand your problem with it.

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!

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

[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.

Story

[Barny]

The poster should probably have linked this http://youtu.be/PomBYSELEPE which is the guy himself giving his talk on what he did and why.

Some funny stuff.

Re:Still calling himself a hacker

[realityimpaired]

Since music was involved, would that make him a smooth criminal?

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

Re:Only Happy When It Rains?

[jones_supa]

Ditto. Garbage is an excellent band. :)