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The Mystery Tracks Being 'Forced' on Spotify Users (musicbusinessworldwide.com)
It's been nearly two years since news blog MusicBusinessWorld kicked off a global conversation over 'fake artists' on Spotify. That debate is about to roar back into life. From a report: Multiple Spotify users have been complaining that their official listening history on Spotify appears to have been infiltrated by acts that they don't simply recognize. The trend was spotted by the BBC, which reported on Friday that plays of 'mystery' tracks from artists such as Bergenulo Five, Bratte Night, DJ Bruej and Doublin Night were being credited within individual Spotify user accounts -- despite these same users knowing nothing about this music.
"Apart from being musically unremarkable, they generally have a few things in common: short songs with few or no lyrics, illustrated with generic cover art, and short, non-descriptive song titles," said the Beeb of these acts -- some of whom had managed to rack up tens of thousands of plays. Albums from these artists contained more than 40 songs apiece, with each track just a minute or two in duration. After the BBC alerted Spotify to the trend, all of these artists disappeared from its platform entirely.
"Apart from being musically unremarkable, they generally have a few things in common: short songs with few or no lyrics, illustrated with generic cover art, and short, non-descriptive song titles," said the Beeb of these acts -- some of whom had managed to rack up tens of thousands of plays. Albums from these artists contained more than 40 songs apiece, with each track just a minute or two in duration. After the BBC alerted Spotify to the trend, all of these artists disappeared from its platform entirely.
Sounds rather similar to the "Rueda" scam run by the SGAE in Spain. It's the royalty administration organisation, and a small group teamed up to play non-tracks all night when no-one was listening, "earning" themselves a large cut of the royalties and of the votes in the organisation.
The books themselves were full of gibberish. Each of them was by a different author, but each of those authors wrote nothing but nonsense titles full of gibberish like:
"Everyone else forecast they?d find yourself collectively and partnered by the point they certainly were twenty. Well, they predicted correct; not in how they believed it can result. One-day within their sixteenth seasons, problems get a somewhat dreadful change, and products transform permanently."
The scam worked because back then kindle Unlimited paid out by how many pages you read ... but it measured this by recording the furthest page visited in the book. The genuinely curious would open the book, see the beginning was gibberish, then check further in to see if it was still gibberish. Plus I'm sure bots with Kindle Unlimited accounts "read" quite a few.
There is still one of these titles up:
https://www.amazon.com/Way-Sto...