[antonp]

> Another TIDAL subscriber, music critic Geir Rakvaag, supposedly played tracks from Kanye West’s The Life Of Pablo 96 times in a single day – with 54 plays in the middle of the night.

>“It’s physically impossible,” he says.

>The list goes on.

The sql query that generated all those fake listens shouldn't have passed QA. /s

[simias]

Is he using "physically impossible" for emphasis or is it really physically impossible for him to have listened to the track 96 times in a day? Because according to Wikipedia the longest track on that album is "No More Parties in LA" whose duration is 6:14 so it would take just under 10 hours to play it 96 times in a row. If you use shorter tracks and depending how short a play should be to count (I assume you don't have to listen from start to finish to count?) you could be done much faster. "I Love Kanye" is only 44 second long for instance. I wouldn't be surprised if some die-hard Kanye West fans had listened to more than 96 of his tracks in a day.

What if he simply put the album on repeat and left it running somewhere by mistake? There are 20 tracks in the album for a total length of 66:39, on repeat you'll rich 96 tracks played in a little over 5 hours. It doesn't sound implausible if it plays in the background while doing chores or other things. That would explain the plays during the night as well if he left it running on a muted computer.

Not that it invalidates the rest of the study or that it would surprise me if somebody had tinkered with the numbers, I just thought that it was a bit sloppy to use "physically impossible" when it's just "unlikely".

[testudovictoria]

This is plausible in either direction.

I once turned down the volume for a streaming service one evening probably to talk to a friend. The playlist played through the night and well into the next evening. Depending on the playlist, some tracks could have gotten 15+ plays due to absent-mindedness.

I can definitely see a music critic putting together short playlists (e.g. 3 songs) for work on a specific album, article, or project. 3 songs at 3.5 minutes each in a playlist would take 10.5 minutes to play and loop 5.714 per hour. You could get 96 plays out of all 3 tracks by continuously looping the playlist 16.8 times.

Again, I'm not saying the numbers aren't inflated, but it's possible for some of these to be false-positives.

[Jemmeh]

Perhaps they meant the entire album was played 96 times. 66:39 x 96.

I myself am a serial song repeater. I use it a lot for focus. Noise to drown out other sounds, but familiarity so I don't start thinking about the music instead of work.

[MatthiasP]

The engineer that got told to fake data probably was not overly enthusiastic about the task. Maybe it is even the same guy who leaked the harddrive to the newspaper.