(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- ① Buy streams
You pay a company to stream your songs a certain number of times—one charges $2.99 per 1,000 plays for a minimum of 500,000 plays.
The payoff: Spotify pays royalties that are divided based on an artist’s share of overall listening on the platform. The paid streams make the song appear more popular, which helps attract real listeners, further boosting a song’s ranking. To reduce the impact of paid streams, Spotify caps the number from any one account that can factor into its charts. Fakers can get around that by using more accounts.② Hack playlists
You double down and buy cheap rights to more songs nobody wants to listen to—think elevator music and video game soundscapes—to create a playlist, then stream it nonstop.
The payoff: This scheme can be even more lucrative than buying listens, and the same multiplier effect applies. Spotify has said it has measures in place to detect fraudulent activity. Many have been caught by record execs who spotted strange listening patterns while perusing the charts. The telltale signs include playlists with few followers and hundreds of songs, each of which has been played roughly the same number of times. Still, more than one scammer has made it onto Spotify’s regional Top 40 playlists this way.
https://open.spotify.com/user/3uix1aingq7hlmcowe7jmn1s9/playlist/6f7BMsgYRKMfcrWHAn1pX9
To contact the author of this story: Lucas Shaw in Los Angeles at lshaw31@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jillian Goodman at jgoodman74@bloomberg.net.
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