In a perfect example of the potential made available by the deleterious effects of bad business models music streaming services, someone has been charged with defrauding Spotify to the tune of $10 million dollars.
The allegation is that Michael Smith created a ton of low-effort “music” - of course eventually turning to the tools of artificial intelligence after he realised he couldn’t make nearly enough money from his own more natural efforts. He then invented a big pile of bands that don’t exist to use as the supposed artist accounts that this music could be uploaded to Spotify under.
He then created a huge number of fake accounts for imaginary people - maybe as many as 10,000 - in order to “listen” to that music, which he did via streaming from a variety of computers that appeared to be in different places.
Because it was so many different songs from so many different artists listened to by so many different people - all fake - he wasn’t detected for a while.
It seems it was very much financially worthwhile for him, at least for a while.
From the NYT’s report on this:
According to a financial breakdown that he emailed himself in 2017 — the year that prosecutors say he began the scheme — Mr. Smith calculated that he could stream his songs 661,440 times each day. At that rate, he estimated, he could bring in daily royalty payments of $3,307.20 and as much as $1.2 million in a year.
Of course, because of how Spotify pay-outs work - in simple terms they take the revenue they make from user subscriptions and advertising and divide it up between the artists based on what % of streams the artist receives - presumably this was to the direct financial detriment of other, real, artists (and all the other organisations that also take a cut before it reaches the artist).