FBI arrests American singer for using Bot streams to generate $10m in royalties

[MacDaddy]

Story on MSN.com here.

 

I'm thinking good on him, he gamed an unfair system. Is it any different to people who are doing Blockchain mining?

Not sure about the claim that he stole money from other rights holders?

[lemmywinks]

When the system is set up to undermine and exploit artists you can't really grumble when artists figure out how to undermine and exploit the system.

[Lozz196]

There`s too many things that can be looked at in music - is it right that a £70 ticket gets "dynamically priced" at £350. Is it right that people, after paying that £350 to see a singer actually get a dance show with the singer miming. I`d prefer these things to be looked at first.

[Downunderwonder]

The article claims they allege he stole royalty cash that would have gone to legitimate artists. I have no idea if that is true or not.

[borntohang]

26 minutes ago, MacDaddy said:

Story on MSN.com here.

 

I'm thinking good on him, he gamed an unfair system. Is it any different to people who are doing Blockchain mining?

Not sure about the claim that he stole money from other rights holders?

 

Just now, Downunderwonder said:

The article claims they allege he stole royalty cash that would have gone to legitimate artists. I have no idea if that is true or not.

 

Spotify doesn't actually pay a fixed fee per stream - their monthly ad and subscription income is pooled and then 70% is distributed to artists based on the percentage of those monthly streams they get. If every other artist on Spotify mysteriously disappeared for a month but your song stayed online and you got 20 streams, then technically you would be entitled to the entire monthly artist revenue.

 

Obviously that's a silly scenario, but if this guy was gaming billions of streams then other artists would absolutely have got less money then they would have done otherwise. Probably not enough that anybody is losing their house over it because frankly they still pay naff all, but it's still pissing in the pool.

[Cliff Edge]

1 hour ago, MacDaddy said:

Story on MSN.com here.

 

I'm thinking good on him, he gamed an unfair system. Is it any different to people who are doing Blockchain mining?

Not sure about the claim that he stole money from other rights holders?

“Federal Bureau of Intelligence”. I quite like that 🙂

 

[LeftyJ]

Allegedly he's been doing this for years, and somehow he has managed to stay under the radar for most of this time. I wonder how long he would have been able to keep this up if he hadn't set his bots to such an unbelievably high number of streams. You'd have to be a pretty high-profile artist to get the numbers he was getting. "Taylor Swift... check. Beyoncé... check. Michael... wait. Michael who?"

 

It's a pity a song needs a minimum of 1000 streams per year to gain any revenue at all as of recently. My old band used to get about €100-150 a year from CDbaby from online sales and streams but that's over now. 

[BigRedX]

1 hour ago, LeftyJ said:

It's a pity a song needs a minimum of 1000 streams per year to gain any revenue at all as of recently.

 

If you do a bit of promotion and get your songs onto a reasonably popular playlist, it's easy to get 1000 streams a year. Our most popular songs get around 1000 streams a month.

 

Besides if your not getting that many streams you are unlikely to be earning enough from on-line activities to trigger your Aggregator's minimum payment threshold, so you wouldn't be getting any money anyway.

 

As I've said before the main revenue streams for small bands are:

1. T-shirt sales at gigs

2. Physical media (Records/CDs/Cassettes) sales at gigs

3. PRS songwriting royalties from playing gigs.

 

So get writing some songs and playing some gigs, and use Spotify as free advertising for these activities.

[LeftyJ]

32 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

 

If you do a bit of promotion and get your songs onto a reasonably popular playlist, it's easy to get 1000 streams a year. Our most popular songs get around 1000 streams a month.

 

Besides if your not getting that many streams you are unlikely to be earning enough from on-line activities to trigger your Aggregator's minimum payment threshold, so you wouldn't be getting any money anyway.

 

As I've said before the main revenue streams for small bands are:

1. T-shirt sales at gigs

2. Physical media (Records/CDs/Cassettes) sales at gigs

3. PRS songwriting royalties from playing gigs.

 

So get writing some songs and playing some gigs, and use Spotify as free advertising for these activities.

 

Very true. In this case my band more or less ceased to exist - so it's not that strange we're not getting the attention we used to. Our only album dates from 2013.

 

The band I currently play with had an interesting problem with their streaming services: their aggregator went bankrupt and ceased all activities - but all the bands they represent are still on Spotify and the likes, except they're not getting paid and they can't remove their music because they need their aggregator to do that for them. The band have tried to take matters into their own hands, and have succeeded with a few streaming services (like Deezer), but Spotify are a pain in the proverbial behind in this matter and won't communicate with these artists directly or take any action to let the artists take back control over their content on Spotify. I think they were with Ledo. 

Edited September 10 by LeftyJ