Hacker Spoofs Track Plays To Top Music Charts 157
mask.of.sanity writes "Stand aside P!nk, Niki Minaj; you've just been beaten by a music generator. One Aussie security expert curious about the fraud mechanisms at play on streaming services like Spotify uploaded garbage music tracks and directed three Amazon virtual machines to click the play button 24/7 for a month, earning him top spot in online music charts and $1000 in royalties."
Re:OMG (Score:5, Informative)
He can always go back to preventing World War Three [wikipedia.org].
Re:Most interesting point (Score:5, Informative)
$1000 for just three "listeners" playing the songs 24/7 for a month. That's 3*30*24=2160hours, so about 50ct per hour played. 50ct is probably more than the royalties on a single CD which the buyers can play as often as they like. If I had 50ct for every hour someone used my software, I'd be a rich man.
Story (Score:5, Informative)
The poster should probably have linked this http://youtu.be/PomBYSELEPE [youtu.be] which is the guy himself giving his talk on what he did and why.
Some funny stuff.
Re:Beaten by a music generator? (Score:5, Informative)
Would you prefer the committee to sing their own songs or the average singer composing their own songs?
I don't see much advantage in having the composer and the singer being the same person. I care about the final product.
Since the advent of autotune, most pop acts are not chosen for their ability to sing, they're chosen for their ability to look pretty. There aren't a lot of singer/songwriters in *that* genre, but once you get out of it, you'll find the majority of the *really* good stuff is performed by the same person or people who wrote it: performances are more visceral when the performer has an emotional connection with what they're playing.
So you can have your fake plastic people performing fake plastic songs. Personally, I'll avoid the pop music genre, and stick with artists who actually deserve the name.
Re:OMG (Score:4, Informative)
Wait til you hear how Avril Lavigne negotiated the 2010 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.
Note to mods though: "Insightful" does not mean "told me something I didn't know."
Re:Most interesting point (Score:4, Informative)
> $1000 for a track being played 24/7? No wonder
> artists all think Spotify is a sick joke.
Old news. Check out this chart [mashable.com] from 3 years ago.
Another fun fact: Spotify has 20 million songs. Twenty percent of them -- four million songs -- have never been played. [marketingland.com]