Bruce Lawson ✅ ♫ ♿ ✌️♂️✊20h ago
A man used LLMs to generate hundreds of thousands of "songs", then used bots to stream them billions of times, to collect $8m in royalties. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-man-pleads-guilty-music-streaming-fraud-aided-artificial-intelligence-0 Is there a better metaphor for late-stage capitalism than burning resources to make songs that are never listened to, then steaming them to robots that will never hear them, ad infinitum?
Show threadGary 19h ago

@brucelawson it's more than a little bit Devil's Advocate, but I'm struggling to see how this is fraud other than that it cost Spotify $8m

The money certainly didn't get diverted away from other more deserving artists. (*edit* apparently it does, as Spotify no longer pays artists per stream, but as a percentage of overall streams). It's only Spotify that's out of pocket because someone gamed their broken business model.

Fuck 'em 😒

(But of course we all know who the US courts will side with)

Show threadSette (they/them)
@WiteWulf @brucelawson I wish that were the case, but artists on Spotify are not paid per stream, but according to their achieved percentage of total streams.
Mar 23 at 4:17pmWeb
Show threadGary 19h ago
@basil @brucelawson oh, I didn’t know they changed to that hellish method. That’s *awful* 😳
Show threadOtte Homan - remember Geordie14h ago
@WiteWulf Spotify used to be the first (?) legally allowed streaming service that claimed to "enable independent artists to publish their work outside of the corset of the music publishing industry". That was a long time ago. It's now just about taking in as many dollars for their shareholders as possible. @basil @brucelawson