crazystory

How did a random guy manage to scam Spotify out of more than $1,000,000… without anyone actually listening to his music?

Spotify pays about $0.004 every time a song is played for at least 30 seconds, so this guy came up with a simple idea. He uploaded 467 tracks, each just over 30 seconds long, and then bought 1,200 Spotify Premium accounts to play his own songs 24/7 on repeat. Those accounts generated around 72 million streams every month, bringing in over $400,000 in royalties, while he was only spending about $12,000 on subscriptions to keep the system running.

The crazy part is that nobody noticed for months. The streams looked legitimate, the accounts were real Premium users, and some of his playlists even climbed the global Spotify charts, with one reaching #11 in the U.S. By the time Spotify finally removed the tracks in 2017, he had already made more than $1 million.

Years later, another man named Michael Smith tried the same idea using AI-generated music and around 10,000 bot accounts. That version made about $10 million, but the way he ran it crossed legal lines. In 2024 the U.S. Department of Justice arrested him, and he was forced to return $8 million.

Same idea.
Two people tried it.

One walked away with $1M. The other is now waiting for sentencing.

#Money #Tech #AI #Internet #CrazyStory

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