I’ve heard it all now: fake music listened to by fake listeners
Once again, reality outdoes fiction: Spotify has cancelled more than ten thousand songs algorithmically created by an outfit called Boomy, on suspicion of “artificial streaming”, online bots posing as human listeners to inflate audience numbers.
We have seen this kind of activity before (I first noticed it in the mid ’90s when I was doing my thesis on the use of the Internet by certain media), with YouTube videos, followers of tenth-rate influencer accounts, and with many other areas. Fake it till you make it. Every time something comes up that pays based on access statistics, a way to manipulate them emerges.
Impressive: robots composing music, so that other robots listen to it and rip off a company that pays based on the number of plays of a given song. This is beyond scamming; this is brazenness on such a level that one can only wonder what kind of warped mind would try to exploit technology in this way. When we talk about how AI is going to change the music industry, this is surely not what we have in mind.
