[dustinmoris]

How is this money laundering? If you use dirty money to sign up to Spotify and listen to specific songs so that you get some of the money “clean” back wouldn’t that in case of Spotify be the dumbest and most inefficient way of laundering in the history of money laundering? I mean doesn’t Spotify keep the majority so you’re essentially donating dirty money into the stock price of Spotify for the most part, no?

[yesbabyyes]

Not necessarily. Let's say you get a burner phone and hook it up at home. You need internet and electricity of course.

Buy a Spotify gift card for $10 USD cash, use that to get Spotify Premium (first use the three months free of course).

Play your (artists') songs, 30 seconds each (considered one stream by Spotify). That's 2880 streams per hour, 86400 streams per month.

Spotify pays around $2-$4 USD per 1000 streams, so that's ~170-340 USD clean money coming in. Some of that goes to Amuse/TuneCore/etc. Then music production, admin, etc. But there seems to be quite some money to be made, especially once you manage to fake your way into recommendations and get legit streams as well.

[raunak]

Sorry, but wow you got this wrong. I’m not sure if it was just a guess or something, but look at the comment below for what it actually is. The money laundering is in the form of purchasing botted streams.

[yesbabyyes]

As another comment [0] suggests, this is common at least in Sweden. I have it on first hand that a successful local rapper has the whole apartment full of phones streaming his songs. Floor, shelves, sofa, all full of phones.

I'm sure mixing it with bot traffic is also popular. I also assume that Spotify (et al) are more successful in filtering out bot traffic from central Asia than legit phones in the middle of the target group.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32560737

[dustinmoris]

Who launders pocket money? Anything less than hundreds of thousands of dollars is just not worth laundering. Nobody is going to ask you where you got a few 10k from.

[shp0ngle]

You pay for robots and stolen accounts, you got money per listens.

Spotify doesn’t really get your money at any point. The bots don’t need to be Spotify Premium.

[scatters]

Spotify supposedly pays around 70% of subscription and advertising revenue to labels and rights holders. Since payments are not pro rata per listener but are aggregated over all listens, if your fake customer streams more than the average you could quite possibly make an actual profit from this technique.