Music Industry Targets Troll Farms Distorting Streaming Revenues (ft.com) 52
A music industry hit parade including Spotify, Amazon and Universal is moving to stifle an emerging threat to the sector's business model: fake streams [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; an alternative source was not immediately available.] From a report: [...] A growing army of online bots posing as human listeners is distorting the distribution of these revenues, inflating listening figures for certain tracks to earn higher royalty payments and chart placings. A coalition of 21 technology groups, record labels and music publishers on Thursday agreed a "code of best practices", in the first collective push by the biggest players in music to combat stream manipulation. The group, which also includes Warner Music and Sony Music, warned that "industrial-scale" impersonation of users by "troll farms" was distorting perceptions of what music is popular, according to the document seen by the Financial Times, and vowed to thwart such manipulation by weeding out the bots from the music fans.
Troll farm? (Score:5, Insightful)
So downloading music to listen to by bots fits within the definition of a troll farm?
I don't think so... It may be unethical, like bots to boost ad clicks, but it's not trolling in the traditional sense of the term.
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Re: Troll farm? (Score:5, Funny)
I think we've found it, these "troll farms" are apparently severely altering what supposed to be popular and good music.
Finally we have an explanation for Rap, Taylor Swift and Katie Perry!!
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I agree, but it's mostly the Media that's causing this (politicians and businesses only know about "trolls" because of the media). And it's ALL media, not just Left media.
The only reason it seems like it's mostly 'the Left' is because the Media is mostly left. Fox news, republican politicians, right leaning businesses all make these exact same errors, you just hear less about their side of things in general.
Also, the perception I have is that the Right is more ignorant of internet culture in general, so a R
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In reality this is Peeping Toms vs. mannequins, where Peeping Toms are complaining to the rest of us that they could only see plastic groins through the key hole.
But that's our job (Score:2)
distorting perceptions of what music is popular
But that's our job! [wikipedia.org]
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I've often wondered if I was an artist with songs on streaming services, if it would be worthwhile to keep my songs streaming over and over again on my own computer. Would the royalty be larger than the cost of the electricity and internet charges?
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God, that Re-Captcha nonsense. I got stuck on one that absolutely did not need Captcha at all. Spent a half hour answering Captcha after Captcha, all because I clicked a square that had a bumper of a bus in it when the thing said to "click all the squares with buses in them". Then I'm sure, two Captcha's later, that edge of a street sign probably did me in.
What a fucking worthless system.
And how is this different (Score:2)
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From people going to the few stores that actually counted for the charts and buying up all the discs they needed to set the charts up the right way?
This rtime it's done by the little guy and costing the big guys money; which is unfair. Just ask any major label CEO.
They could ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in the early days of the Internet, it was said that 'Nobody knows if you are a dog.' Well, welcome to a marketing model where the marginal value of each view is zero. You want a sales channel where the data is worth something? That's going to cost you something in terms of brick and mortar outlets, product display cases and sales clerk salaries.
Even Amazon understands this.
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No they didn't. Maybe one label did that one time, and every other label said "you're a fucking idiot, don't do that, you idiot". You're paying someone else to give you your own product, when you could be dumping all of that on the retailer themselves, AND make money off it.
Instead what labels did was just counted all the sales to the shops as retail sales, not the actual sales to end customers. It was up to the shops to guess the right amount of media to buy. Since it's very very bad for a retailer to have
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So if the retailer bought 1,000 copies and only sold 100
Next month, no Taylor Swift CD orders. And none the following month either. Looks like Tay Tay was a flash in the pan.
Surveillance capitalism meets algorithmic pop (Score:2)
I don't know who to cheer for in this fight, but no matter the outcome, human consumers win.
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She was popular in the first place? :-)
What about the sound of silence? (Score:2)
My favorite musician troll story is the guy that recorded ten minutes of silence and asked his fans to have it set to stream constantly when they were NOT listening to other music.
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Are you referring to Sleepify by Vulfpeck? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepify
This article may be about this process where bands are uploaded so that they can be played back for the royalties.
the best option (Score:1)