Bruce Lawson ✅ ♫ ♿ ✌️♂️✊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?
Joe Brockmeier@brucelawson Don't forget effectively stealing royalties from other artists who actually deserve them...
Eggs now in different baskets.@jzb @brucelawson How companies such as Spotity choose to pay out "royalties", which algorithms they use are at best opaque.
In a recent article in Klassekampen a Spotify user who has had a paid subscription for 16 years discovered that his favourite artists had benefited to the tune of 262 Norwegian Crowns (around EUR 23) IN TOTAL during that 16 year period.
Paywall article
https://klassekampen.no/utgave/2026-03-12/avslorer-hva-artister-tjener-pa-din-lytting
