But this is more troubling than it seemed at first to me. Couldn't something like this also happen: So I could put my song on Spotify (or YouTube or any other ad-supported service) and some business can come along and set up a bot to open Spotify and play my tune and several others. Spotify will also play ads and probably show ads on the page during playback because it's not a paid-for account. Now Spotify determines that this stream was sent to a bot. They remove the play counts from my tracks and any others played. Do they return the ad revenue from those ad impressions? If not, what's stopping Spotify from just making up numbers, charging the advertisers and discounting my revenue without there really being a bot stream? How can any of these ad-supported businesses be held accountable? This seems insane.
I'm not saying they're actually doing the above. I assume they are not, but it makes me wonder about how you would even know? It could even happen accidentally due to some error in their software. That seems less than ideal.
I'm not sure how fraud detection works there, though. Maybe there's third party counting that includes third party fraud checks? Back then, at least, the incentive to spot fraud wasn't high - advertisers didn't want to admit to their stakeholders that they were wasting their money any more than the adtech network wanted to admit it to the advertiser.
Your scenario is also interesting from the publisher side - especially on non-web properties where a musician doesn't even have the ability to embed their own JS in their song to collect their own counts or use someone else's playcount counting library...
Incentives in the music industry are setup such that any company offering promotional services to artists (ad agency, PR firm, promoter, radio promo, marketing department, etc) can quietly go to fiverr.com, buy 100,000 bot streams for $20, then take credit for their client’s rise in popularity—-getting the artist to pay again.
Which, because of how streaming services pay, steals from artists who have real/organic streams.
From the point of view of a streaming service, it looks like this:
1) music is generated from bands via spontaneous generation
2) we throw that music up on a streaming site without context or support unless paid by major labels
3) profit
That’s not how it works. Good music is usually developed in some context- a community of musicians will develop in some major city in a location where the rent is not too high. They go to each other’s shows, they support each other, they learn from each other, they imitate each other and develop new sounds. Once in a while one group becomes popular enough that people outside of that community start to hear about them.
But, just as Facebook has become a news aggregator and should probably take that responsibility seriously, iTunes should take its responsibility seriously to the musical community that generates the product it sells. It could start recommending to people bands that are local to them- who they could go see live. It could tie in promoting live experiences of the bands a user is listening to. They could redistribute the streaming profits a little to give some financial support to smaller artists instead of the top 10 bands who play on a loop at Applebee’s. There are lots of ways that they could foster the growth of musical communities, and they aren’t doing it.
One good thing about the old music industry was that they would at least somewhat do this for struggling bands- they would identify talent, and develop and promote it. iTunes doesn’t do that. Spotify doesn’t do that. A lot of talent is going to wither on the vine without support.
Both of these trends put traditionally local restaurants and small bands under increased pressure to compete with the likes of VC-funded Spotify or DoorDash. The pessimist in me sees a future where these local business are largely gone, kind of like how Walmart and other big box stores replaced many small, local retailers.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15961416/spotify-fake-art...
[1] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/nearly-40000-tracks-a...
It’s not all bad, but these are cool ideas.
They seem to have a huge problem at SC and it’s not clear to me that they have any reason to try to stop it. I have been reporting this behavior for years and from my perspective it hasn’t gotten any better.
I have no evidence for this but it feels like Soundcloud is on life support and they have zero or near-zero developers working on it.
I mean with email, spambots are always a net negative because the services that pass e-mails through do not get paid for them. But Twitter does. If you get a bot tweet on your feed, or a bot-promoted one, you engage with it and Twitter gets paid (in 'engagement', the magical currency).
eBay has a "compromised account monetization" bot that has used the exact same distinctive fraudulent listings weekly for years and they still use a manual process to deal with it.
Soundcloud really looked like they were growing faster than their ability to handle it. Thinking it may actually be the smarter play.
On a related note, their business models are completely different. Bandcamp is bootstrapped and profitable, while SoundCloud is dependent on investment money and almost went bankrupt a few years ago.
Source: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/soundcloud-revenues-s....
Well they have been teetering on the brink of collapse for a long time, so no, I wouldn't expect them to have tons of resources. I'm surprised they're still around to be honest.
For example, if you ask for a particular classic song, and some newer cover is available, Apple Music will play the cover. Sometimes you must specifically ask for the song by the original artists name.
I have gotten this vibe in some “curated” playlists as well.
Could also just be bad algorithms, however since Apple Music “For You” has felt very payolla-y in the past I would not be surprised if the company used tricks anywhere it could to increase margins on the Music service.
So many scams are targeted to musicians.
american companies still hate the success of spotify
the music industry is bad
