Hacker Spoofs Track Plays To Top Music Charts

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."

Most interesting point

[IamTheRealMike]

The fact that services don't have automated play de-spamming system should not come as a big surprise, given the pathetic earnings available. That's not research worth doing. But the outcome is - just $1000 for a track being played 24/7? No wonder artists all think Spotify is a sick joke. They won't have to automate anti-abuse systems until the amount they're dishing out to artists goes way, way beyond that paltry amount. It's not even worth gaming their charts right now.

The virtual world once more duplicates the real

[Bruce66423]

Once upon a time it was possible to raise your position in the charts by buying the record in the shops that reported sales, and there was a small industry dedicated to this... Good to see certain traditions haven't been killed by computers!

Re:Noun, verb, noun noun verb (or: terrible headli

[wonkey_monkey]

Learning (v.? n.?) reading (v.? n.?) comprehension helps too.

Gah!

No issues for me understanding what they meant with that headline. And I'm not even a native English speaker.

Well, good for you. Maybe it helps that you're not a native English speaker, and are less familiar with the alternate meanings of some words. I happen to have a very good handle on the written word, so maybe that's why I'm overly sensitive to these things.

My point is not that the headline is more likely to be misread than read correctly (although I suspect this particular one might be), but that ambiguity can and should be avoided regardless.

Re:Beaten by a music generator?

[Hognoxious]

Would you prefer the committee to sing their own songs or the average singer composing their own songs?

I'd prefer them to all fall off a cliff.

Re:Noun, verb, noun noun verb (or: terrible headli

[Anonymous Coward]

"but that ambiguity can and should be avoided regardless"

I thought you said you were good with the written word? Certainly you know that no native human language passes as a regular language because they're all horribly ambiguous and context sensitive. So much so, that it really is impossible to avoid. I mean, hell, anything can be turned into an innuendo if you add proper inflection. But on a less dirty area the word "lead", is that a collar, a position in a race, a soft heavy metal? Read, is that something I do to a book or have just done to a book. Spoken out loud, now is it red read, read or reed.

One of my favorites comes in with "lead pipe" from the game clue. For the longest time I thought it was some sort of plumbing term, I thought "lead" was as in "I'm leading the race", because in my day and age, you'd never make a pipe out of the metal lead, because it's horrible as a pipe material as it's soft, doesn't hold pressure well, and poisons whatever goes through it. But no, it's the metal. I also wouldn't imagine bashing somebodies head in with something so malleable, I'd assume you'd want to use something a bit harder.

This overly long post I guess is just a way of saying ambiguity in the written word, as long as it's spoken language is more or less unavoidable.

Re:Gaining money

[hairyfish]

Seems odd they they can't adopt your model, I mean they have logs of every song played by which users so it should be trivial to allocate each user's contribution directly to the artists. In fact they could take it a step further and have user charts to see who gave the most money to which artist, then fans could compete with each other to see who is the biggest fan by who pays their favourite artist the most. Then the artist could reward their biggest fans with a phone call or something or a back stage pass. The technology is there to make this work, fans win, the artists win, if only the money grubbers that own the copyrights had more interest in making it work.

Re:Click fraud is possible! News at 11.

[Charliemopps]

You've obviously never worked with Marketing people before. It's just one giant clusterfuck of lies. Marketing has to prove their department is worth keeping so they want to inflate the number of clicks they got just as much as the vendor does. Remember the "Got Milk" campaign? One of the largest and most recognized ad campaigns in history and milk sales went DOWN while it was going on. It did more for the stars that showed up in the adds than it ever did for the milk industry.

Re:Most interesting point

[MiniMike]

The actual amount earned in the study is arbitrary. He could have just as easily set up more virtual machines and multiplied the amount, if those were the only source. Also it's not clear if the payment was only from his clicks, or if it includes clicks from unsuspecting listeners who were drawn by the artificially high rating, so your calculation of 50 cents may be off.