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Fans Are Spoofing Spotify With 'Fake Plays', And That's A Problem For Music Charts (buzzfeednews.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Billboard charts have long been the gold standard by which musicians measure their success, but as recent tantrums by the likes of Nicki Minaj have highlighted, the rising influence of streaming services is upending that model -- and giving die-hard fans a way to manipulate the data. A recent release by the Korean pop group BTS prompted its superfandom, millions strong across the globe, to do just that by launching a sophisticated campaign to make sure the boy band reached No. 1.
The strategy employed by the so-called BTS Army went largely like this: Fans in the US created accounts on music streaming services to play BTS's music and distributed the account logins to fans in other countries via Twitter, email, or the instant messaging platform Slack. The recipients then streamed BTS's music continuously, often on multiple devices and sometimes with a virtual private network (VPN), which can fake, or "spoof," locations by rerouting a user's traffic through several different servers across the world. Some fans will even organize donation drives so other fans can pay for premium streaming accounts.
"Superfans of pop acts have long been doing this sort of thing," said Mark Mulligan, managing director of the digital media analysis company MIDIA Research. "But if a superfan has decided to listen nonstop to a track, is that fake? If so, how many times do they have to listen to a track continuously before it is deemed 'fake'?" One BTS fan group claimed it distributed more than 1,000 Spotify logins, all to make it appear as though more people in the US were streaming BTS's music and nudge their album Love Yourself: Tear up the Spotify chart, which in turn factors into Billboard's metrics.
The strategy employed by the so-called BTS Army went largely like this: Fans in the US created accounts on music streaming services to play BTS's music and distributed the account logins to fans in other countries via Twitter, email, or the instant messaging platform Slack. The recipients then streamed BTS's music continuously, often on multiple devices and sometimes with a virtual private network (VPN), which can fake, or "spoof," locations by rerouting a user's traffic through several different servers across the world. Some fans will even organize donation drives so other fans can pay for premium streaming accounts.
"Superfans of pop acts have long been doing this sort of thing," said Mark Mulligan, managing director of the digital media analysis company MIDIA Research. "But if a superfan has decided to listen nonstop to a track, is that fake? If so, how many times do they have to listen to a track continuously before it is deemed 'fake'?" One BTS fan group claimed it distributed more than 1,000 Spotify logins, all to make it appear as though more people in the US were streaming BTS's music and nudge their album Love Yourself: Tear up the Spotify chart, which in turn factors into Billboard's metrics.
Have the play only count if the track was played all the way (or mostly) through.
I remember on Digg back in the day they made movies seem more popular than they really were due to astroturfing fanboys dominating the submissions queue.
Oh my god.
Will the internet survive?
Tune in after the break!
For any account, only count one play per week. Technically these are supposed to be individual user accounts, so you count one user as liking the song. Done, fixed forever.
The metric can be modified to ignore the impact of superfans if it's the popularity among the general public that matters.
Superfans will buy any album the group will produce, good or bad, so are good for the bottom line. It's sales to the general public that make a song a hit or an also ran.
That stupid asshole was in the top of the Apple Music trending chart for like three weeks, and he is one of the most generic rappers I have ever heard. Like who the fuck listens to that guy? Bots probably is who.
(before internet streaming) labels would 'buy' their own product to achieve the same thing. they probably still do.
book publishers have done the same thing for decades to buy their way to the top of best seller lists.
In many cases the charts were based on wholesale sales vs retail sales, so could easily be manipulated by record companies who also controlled retail outlets or convinced retailers it was "going to be huge".
You could also see albums go Multi Gold / Platinum etc on release day... when the retail sales metrics couldn't weren't fed back that quickly at the time.
Manipulating the charts has always been the game...
CAP: counters
More lies from you, but that's no surprise. Absolutely nobody impersonated you. Sure, c6gunner parodied your testimonials, but that's not impersonation. As far as I can tell, you actually posted the hosts file spam and claimed that it protects against Spectre and Meltdown.
no, my posts denigrating your pointless and crappy software are in fact true. I have spoken. prease 2b lrnink 2 engrish.
Fake plays for fake bands!
Back in the day, labels/artists would pay DJs to play certain tapes or tracks over and over again even if they weren't all that good just to get them to the top. They still do in a way but nowadays the music labels simply own the radio stations so nobody gets paid.
There were ways to get around the labels and some artists also got very creative to spike the public's ears (eg Bohemian Rhapsody).
I'd say what old is new again, as long as people care about any single list to inform their taste this will happen.
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c6gunner your FAKEname's on a post impersonating me & worse is you altering /. user's words https://linux.slashdot.org/com... as I challenged you to show you do better work and you can't after you tried to mock me you hypocrite LYING loser https://linux.slashdot.org/com... .
* You're online FAKENAME trash c6gunner & a childish dishonest punk!
(PUTTING WORDS IN MY MOUTH TOO saying what I don't (on spectre/meltdown) https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... )
APK
P.S.=> Impossible to deny FACT of your FAKEname (for your FAKE wasted lie of a so-called life) on that 1st post link above you unbelievable pussy loser... apk
This is just like the radio, spamming the same song over and over again. Played in stores, where nobody is listening, but it is getting play so it MUST be good and popular.
I remember there is or was another music site, and you had to load a certain thing in order to trigger it to add to the "play" counter. So then you can take devices like raspberry pi and get a few dozen of them, load them all with a list of free VPNs, then it's totally easy to give any song 1+ million plays in under a day, no sweat. Back then you could have 10 plays per IP per day.
So let's say the host blocks the VPN IP ranges.
Then another easy way to do it is create a browser plugin, and pay people for every so many "plays" etc.. This is how some people manipulate YouTube view counts.
I don't see any way of stopping it.
I am surprised people trust the counts at all.
No one who's slightly tech-literate should be surprised by this. And, in a way, I applaud the masses for using the internet to achieve exactly what the 'elite' used to do ALL THE TIME in the music and book industries ('bestseller' walls at book stores with brand new publications.. who got those on the bestseller lists, if they were brand new? No one -- paid placement.)
It's nice to see the rich 'kingmakers' get a taste of what they do all the time to manipulate us. Then again, they probably don't care *too* much since they get a huge cut of it all anyhow whenever someone becomes a pop star.
Years ago a new JLo song got to over 500 million views on youtube. I listened to it and there was nothing there. I had no desire to hear it again. It was a flop.
I always wondered if it hadn't been artificially plumped up.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Iâ(TM)m completely NOT surprised to hear that kpop fans (in particular) are doing this. This is 1000% the kpop crazy fan M.O. Their fan groups are so far beyond invested in their celebrities than what western countriesâ(TM) fan groups are. Example: they also buy PILES upon piles of physical album copies in South Korea to skew chart numbers there. The artistâ(TM)s companies play into the âoegameâ by releasing multiple covers for albums and/or inserts including photo books, photo cards, prizes certificates, and contest codes per âoealbumâ release. For a group, there might be 1or 2 covers per member. Look at the number of members in some kpop groups â" several have 7+ members. Now you can see the insanity.
Iâ(TM)m a kpop fan but I knew there was some level of shenanigans going on with BTSâ(TM) âoepopularityâ in the US. I know fan groups bust their arses to game Youtube video numbers massively so I already discount those as bullcrap. The only one I believe is 100% real is Psy.
The stakes are incredibly high here also, far more than non-kpop fans would expect. All young men in South Korea are expected to serve in the military for nearly two years, no matter who they are. My own favorite musicians, actors, etc., have had to leave their careers and serve. Health exemptions are possible but can be shamed heavily for celebrities for possibly being faked. One other way to be exempt is bringing international glory to SK. Like being an Olympic gold medalist. Some people recently started calling for kpop stars who gain huge international recognition, (SPECIFICALLY naming BTS) to be exempted as well. Itâ(TM)s a controversial topic, to be sure, but you could see how a company would be SORELY tempted to game numbers where they can if they can keep their #1 moneymaker group from having to sacrifice members for two years each at the peak of their popularity.
it plays through. then it plays again. and again.
it's the artists and record companies who want them to be counted like this. and who's to say they aren't actually listening to it?
the thing that will happen sooner or later is just going to go so that an account can either listen a song for only say 5-10 times in a day or any listens after that don't generate any royalties or chart advancement.
which way it goes depends on artists.
that's a problem with an all you can eat streaming service that pays per plays. from consumer side, why shouldn't they be able to stream the same song 24/7 if they want? from artist side, why shouldn't they get paid for those?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
If you simply ignore the music charts, then there is no problem.
I simply cannot comprehend this 'superfandom' phenomenon. I can understand _really_ liking a band, even liking them so much that you encourage, repeatedly, all your friends to listen to them. You buy their merchandise, you go to their concerts, you follow the personal lives of the band members. All understandable, not the type of thing I would do, but I get it.
But paying money out of your own pocket for no personal gain other than your favorite band doing better in the charts? Why? Why not spend that money on more concert tickets, the money will still make it to the band? I just can't understand it
So same old, same old, except the fans are doing it, which actually makes it more legitimate.
reports on itself that it has its own devil agents to tell you what they think you should listen to by rigging the charts.
Except, nobody with a brain uses Spotify : )
Sorry, same for CNN in this case. Nothing-buger story.
Back in the early days of radio, radio stations asked their listeners to send in post cards with their favorite song so they'd play it. Which quickly prompted wannabe stars to send in hundreds of post cards to promote their own crooning.
It didn't take long for studios to butt in and in the end, the only one really benefiting from the whole shit was the postal service that saw a spike in postcard and stamp sales. Our radio stations quickly ended it, allegedly when they received nearly a million postcards (out of a population of about 5 million with roughly 500,000 radio sets back then) within a week.
Any system that can be gamed for profit will be gamed.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What's with all the spotify nonsense? Why not just buy as many of their albums as the "superfans" can to spam Billboard the old fashioned way? Unless Billboard has gone completely retarded, it shouldn't matter how many times one account streams a song, after a certain number of plays it should just count as one record sale and stop registering.
I think the real issue is that people care about music charts.
Someone inflicting their taste in music on everyone else is selfish. More to the point, it just demonstrates that these people have moved on from the moniker "fan" a long ago and are really just mindless zealots. I wonder how many of these people promoting this shitty K-pop band even have the excuse of being children.
I remember the first bot threads for his video, I watched it in the first 20,000 views like all the regular chantards of the day. His popularity is a direct result of 4chan botarmy getting him over 1,000,000 hits and into the normie media cycle. 4chan is to blame. Never forget.
Both Koreas have socially rigid cultures with no real possibility of social & economic advancement for the 99% so the majorities are locked into their replacements - vapid consumerism in the south and utter militarization in the north. Neither culture is healthy. Both need years if talk therapy.
Have gnu, will travel.
Psych 101, man. Fan is short for "fanatic," after all. In cognitive neuroscience, we use scales that assess subjects' attitudes that allow us to rank, rate, and partition their behaviors. You can google Celebrity Attitude Scale for one of the more prevalent scales we use when assessing obsession. People with higher scores on the scale possess a well-defined spectrum of cognitive and social dysfunctions. They will, with a probability approaching unity, have negative body image, poor interpersonal boundaries, epistemic closure and cognitive rigidity. You can google Dunning-Kruger Effect for more about cognitive rigidity and epistemic closure. the Dunning-Kruger effect, for example, explains *a lot* about obsessive Trump fans. Obsessive fans exhibit well defined psycho-pathologies like dissociation, addiction, stalking behavior, and compulsive spending/purchasing. Highly obsessive individuals tend to score low on mental health assessments, be clinically depressed, and exhibit anxiety and broad social dysfunction. There is no correlation (yet) between these documented behaviors and Axis I and II psychiatric disorders in the DSM, but I think it is only a matter of time before they are established and incorporated. The data are out there and we are shoring up our models with them.
I mean , why do I want a list , made by anyone, to tell me what I should listen too.
Honestly I mostly listen to the same songs over and over again, in my playlist. Why , because they are the ones I like and especially when they are 'background' music I'd rather not have my attention drawn to something unfamiliar. Those list don't need to be updated weekly, or even monthly. Especially if you make 1 with 100 songs or so on it. It is a false market pressure that people need to listen to 'the new' thing. It is a case of advertisers 'creating a need'.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
I would suggest a set of new metrics.... Number of unique users that played this week and Geometric Mean of plays per month per unique User
In order to discourage cheating... A unique user shall have: a verified name, e-mail address, verified cell phone number shared with no other user, and verified scan of passport, driver's license, or national ID card with the name and address on the ID matching a name and address listed on the account.
Reminds me of teen girls and to a lesser extent boys in the 90's buying up multiple copies of CD releases from their favorite pop band/tart to try and push the album up the release chart, and then calling every radio station, regardless of genre, to request their favorite songs be played. There is nothing worse than a Rock station playing Taylor Swift, et al.
I wanted to listen to that one song from the SuperTramp album over and over and over and over!
Could you close the door please?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And this is why we need on-line voting!
[/sarcasm]
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
c6gunner your FAKEname's on a post impersonating me & worse is you altering /. user's words https://linux.slashdot.org/com... as I challenged you to show you do better work and you can't after you tried to mock me you hypocrite LYING loser https://linux.slashdot.org/com... .
* You're online FAKENAME trash c6gunner & a childish dishonest punk.
(PUTTING WORDS IN MY MOUTH TOO saying what I don't (on spectre/meltdown) https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... )
APK
P.S.=> Impossible to deny FACT of your FAKEname (for your FAKE wasted lie of a so-called life) on that 1st post link above you unbelievable loser... apk
I remember reading something about how a person used ExpressVPN to listen to artists that weren't available in their country. Does Spotify offer diff artists for diff countries?