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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.
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.
Youxre missing the point. The charts are a marketing tool.
It is in their interest to get the highest sales for a product. As the majors compete against each other, they try to game the charts just like everyone else.
There are safegards in place to prevent and detect gaming.
The majors' strategies are more sophisticated than simply multiplay strategies (which are already mitigated).
I know for a fact they the multiplay process described here has little or no effect on the outcome of a streaming based chart and there are mechanisms already in place to prevent this.
So the promoters get control back, by paying the streaming services to insert their songs in to unrelated playlists.
That way one unintentional partial play counts as much as a psycho fan listening to the same song on repeat 24x7
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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...the metric is gameable...
which is the way it has always been, but now the record companies are not the only ones who can game the system.
I came here exactly to say this. They aren't upset about it being manipulated they are upset because they are not the ones doing the manipulation.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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
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.