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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.
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.
(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.
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.
By the sounds of it, you listen to him.
he is one of the most generic rappers I have ever heard
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.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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