Agreed. As a person that has released music, I hate this guy and would like the book thrown at him and anyone mass releasing shitty AI music… It might not be a big corpo doing it, but it’s still fucking creatives over.
TBF, this particular loophole doesn’t take any money from the streaming services. Quite the opposite, it massively inflates their stats.
And while it does siphon money from the big labels, it also impacts small indie artists just trying to earn enough from each play to get to eat.
overload@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
0x0@programming.dev 1 week ago
it also impacts small indie artists just trying to earn enough from each play to get to eat.
I’m sorry but it’s the 21st century, even small indie artists can have their own sites nowadays or, heck, use bandcamp, sellaband… you can’t really use technological complexity as an excuse to depend on fat middlemen.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
It’s not “complexity”.
It’s that end users have no interest in paying for individual songs.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
You and me might buy our music on bandcamp, but the vast, vast, vast majority of people still just pay for spotify and never give how it works a second thought.
A moderetely successful indie artist is still likely to make way more having their albums on streaming services, than they are selling them on bandcamp.
you can’t really use technological complexity as an excuse to depend on fat middlemen.
Is that what I’m doing? At no point did I say streaming services could be fair and good if only this one issue was fixed. Merely that play farming works by skimming the money from real artists.
Now, I’d also like ask “wtf”, since you are kinda suggesting that it is the artist’s that are at fault for not getting the money they need to live, by not using their own websites/bandcamp.
GluWu@lemm.ee 1 week ago
So corporations use ai and bots themselves in order to inflate their stats and steal money from investorsand share holders(see Reddit) and its all cool. Someone does that but it costs the corporation some money. Straight to jail.
Seriously, how has the reddit IPO which was offered to users not been a fraudulently scheme due to the website statistics being based on genuine user interaction with no mention of auto reposting or bots that are either operated by or hired by reddit?
It genuinely seems like the next ponzi scheme but that would require so many federal agencies that stopped giving shit and learning how the world works to see any peep into that business.
But what do I know, I’m just some average Joe that gets audited over a $300 mistake ony annual taxs which I have to pay a private third party more than that to do.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Using AI to provide services or crawlers to scan the internet for pages to add to search evinces is different from what this guy did with bots. Those use cases are not pretending to be a legit user in order to collect money.
What this guy did — using bots to fake listen to music — is in the same category as using bots to click on ads that you put on your own web page: it’s serving no legitimate purpose and only exists to defraud businesses which paid for the ads (or Spotify which is paying the royalties)…
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
Spotify didn’t lose a dime. Their cut is fixed.
What each play is worth is determined by how many plays there were in a month, and the income from subscribers that month.
If the “pot” is ten bucks, and people listen to a hundred songs, each artist gets ten cents for each play. If there were a thousand plays, each play is only worth one cent.
This guy didn’t make money by taking it from spotify, he made it by taking it from everyone else. Spotify actually has no reason to care, and playfarming scams have been happening for years.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 week ago
How does that work though? Presumably he’s not paying subscription fees on all of his bot accounts, so they must be free accounts. I don’t use Spotify, so I don’t even know why they would have free accounts.
Unless he’s hacked other people’s accounts, then that would make sense for the seriousness of these charges.