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- Hacker News
- What I don’t understand. Why are the platforms not just splitting each payers monthly subscription with all the songs they have played that month. If I only play one song - it’s 12.99 for Rick Astley. Or if someone plays music 24/7 their streams are worth much less. That seems like a much fairer system that is impossible to abuse. For ad supported users you can still defraud the advertisers of courseby nasmorn
- Here’s what bothers me: isn’t the United States a free market? What crime did he actually commit? Using services exactly as they are offered? It turns out that now, if you take advantage of the system as it was designed and gain a financial edge, you become a criminal—but if a major corporation does it, they just get a slap on the wrist.by dclavijo
- If Spotify royalties were allocated fairly a scheme like this shouldn't be able to pull more money out than the subscriptions put in.
- After talking at length with claude about this case it seems that while botting music streams does meet the bar for wire fraud, creating thousands of fake accounts on walmart to scalp pokemon cards does not. In my opinion these are the same thing, one just pays out from a shared royalty pool and the other on ebay. I guess that's a big difference from a legal perspective, but from a moral and technical perspective they're the same thing. Michael could have applied the same skills and made millions of dollars flipping GPU's and sneakers without any legal consequences. I'm not sure what the takeaway here is but something about this doesn't feel just to me.by Rasbora
- "Taylor Swift received 9.3 million streams on YouTube Music from family plan streams in April 2023., In the same month, Smith’s bot accounts used family plans to fraudulently stream his AI-generated music 80.9 million times."
what always fascinates me about crime like this is, if this guy hadn't tried to make 8 million dollars with 10k bot accounts and boosted himself straight to the top, he could have easily made a few thousand per month. How are people clever enough to set this scheme up to begin with but don't consider that you maybe shouldn't try to alert the entire fraud department
by Barrin92 - > At times SMITH was using as many as 10,000 Bot Accounts at once to fraudulently stream music, and he used fake email accounts and fraudulently-obtained debit cards to create the Bot Accounts
I gather these are cards that he opened and funded, not stolen cards. I'm surprised at this scale it wasn't detected much sooner.
These accounts had to be listening a lot in order to generate more royalties than the subscription fees. e.g. Spotify family is $21.99/mo for six accounts. That's $440K annually for 10,000 accounts. Sheesh.
by js2 - I am not sure I understand. Surely a AI generated song isn't a "fake song"? Is it a crime to publish an AI generated song?
It seems that what he is guilty of is to generate some fake users pretending to listen to his songs, is that right? I can see how it is fraud, but how is it different from all the dark patterns used by newspapers to generate more page prints (like auto-refreshing pages)?
by cm2187