[zacinbusiness]

I wonder how viable this would be for someone who wants to actually scam Spotify? For example, I'm assuming that with only minimal investment one could produce and submit a series of silent audio tracks. Then one could produce a field of virtualized instances of Spotify and a fleet of bots to "listen" to those tracks. But how expensive would all of that be? And at what scale would the operation be necessary to produce an actual profit, if it could happen at all?

According to this article [1] the artist makes about $.004 per play. So, 250 plays comes out to about a dollar and thus 25,000,000 plays comes out to $100,000 which I would consider to be a pretty good outcome for such a quickly baked scam. But that comes out to 7.5 million hours of streaming at 30 seconds per play, and there are what...9000 or so hours in a year? So over 800 years to make $100,000 (pre-tax).

Now I suppose it could be ramped up. What if we had 100,000 bots that each streamed a clip for 30 seconds and they ran around the clock. If we play one clip for 30 seconds 100,000 times, simultaneously then we get to 100000/250=$400 worth of plays. So then we could make out 100,000 in about 75 hours. But how expensive would it be to run that many bots all at the same time?

Someone please check my math and my assumptions, I'm sure I did something wrong here.

[1]: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/19/zoe-keatin...

[edit 1]: also we need to count the hours planning and spinning up the bots in our value calculation..right?

[edkennedy]

It's really wonderful to see capitalism fueling innovation like this. You would also need to include the cost of processing power + server time/aws vm's required. This assumes also that you won't get caught - extra work will probably be required in making your bots seem like "natural users" so they can't be detected.

[zacinbusiness]

In my case it's more like "I wonder..." fueling innovation. But I'm also too lazy to try it, but if anyone else wants to give it a go and they end up making a profit, please send me along a 5% "idea man" fee :-)

On a more serious note, I wonder if this is something that Spotify already tries to detect? Or if it's such a ludicrous idea that they just assumed no one would really try it?

[username223]

> In my case it's more like "I wonder..." fueling innovation.

You put the wrong part in scare quotes. The word you're looking for is "arbitrage," not "innovation." Some guy figured out that Spotify pays more to send data than Amazon charges to accept and discard it. Eventually Spotify will pay someone to reject this particular scam, then to reject more sophisticated versions, then to reject legitimate songs that look a bit like scams, etc. That's just how things work.

[zem]

the quotes around "I wonder" aren't scare quotes, they're just quotes.

[natdempk]

EC2 Micros run about $0.02 per hour meaning it only takes about 5 plays per hour to be profitable, so you theoretically have ~115 plays that are profitable per hour per client, though its probably more like 100 including ads that play between songs. Assuming you can run more than 1 client per instance the numbers probably get even better. That being said if many people do this it probably gets increasingly less profitable, and also decreases the value of real listens.

Another interesting note is that the songs don't need to be silence. If you're automating this then your bots don't care if they are silent or just short and of questionable quality, which might make it easier to get the songs onto Spotify in the first place. You might even be able to get enough of them up to spread the scam among multiple artists/genres to avoid easy detection.

[loopdoend]

EC2 micros run less than half a cent per hour using spot requests, but I'm not sure why Spotify would want to pay out on obvious non-human use.

One would be better off using a large instance, perhaps running OpenVZ, and proxying the data through residential IPs.

[alecsmart1]

If this is true, then why won't a legit band do this for their own music. They can effectively get paid any amount they want.

[kanzure]

And each of the bots require a separate Spotify subscription?

[alttab]

Im sure the bot can cover his $10 a month bill.

[jonas21]

25M plays at 30 seconds per play would only take 208333 hours, not 7.5 million hours. Your 100,000 bots could make $100,000 in about 2 hours. Of course, if you actually tried this, it seems unlikely that it would go unnoticed.