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.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
There are various methods.
Free tier accounts, paid accounts that rack up so many plays the pay for themselves, malware that hijacks legitimate accounts… There’s even been recommendation algorithm fuckery to manipulate the relevant tracks into getting recommended/autoplayed for a bunch of users.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The whole system seems like a sham to me. If one artist has fans that listen 24/7 and another artist has fans that only listen for one hour a day (but that artist is all they listen to), it should be the same. Each person’s account should have its own “pot” out of the subscription fee that only they can allocate to the artists they listen to. Duration of listening shouldn’t matter at all.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
I fully agree. Spotify’s payment model has been criticized for years, but they refused to consider changing it.
AFAIK youtube music works in the way you suggest, where the money from your subscription gets divide up among whoever you listen to.