Thread for musicians who are clearly trying to abuse streaming services

sort of a counterpoint to this thread

Songs that became famous because of a system glitch

surely there are some musicians who purposely try to deceive streaming services to this end

on a related note there seem to be a lot of famous musicians who are suddenly releasing very lengthy albums which I can only assume is a way to maximize streaming revenue. for example, I just found out that Chris Brown's last 2 albums are both over two hours, with 45 and 32 tracks, respectively. They appear to be tunes proper, as I'm guessing Spotify won't pay you for a 30-second skit. I know I've seen this recently but I can't remember from who.

Old, but I liked this gimmick:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jul/25/vulpeck-the-band-who-made-20000-from-their-silent-spotify-album

Netherfriends has adapted to the algorithms with sheer output and released almost 50 albums this year:
https://open.spotify.com/artist/5nYfBUxnHtI6LAp32fl9qY?si=RvH8ArwSQlqyrkSCSJXNIg

what does putting out that much output do vis a vis algorithms? Does it just boost your visibility?

I put Alio Die albums on repeat on Spotify before leaving work (and often during work too), hope it nets him a few bucks over the course of the year.

It probably does a lot of things, including:
-Just increases the chances that something is going to hit (via an algorithmic or editorial playlist etc)
-Building on that, artists are now able to submit one song per release for playlist consideration, so more releases = more chances to hit that playlist gold
-Those playlists really have an impact, and in fact he's a really good example where it's isolated to intra-Spotify factors (i.e. the tracks with a lot of plays are big because of playlists, not because they were in a tv show or something), and you can see there's one song with 30k or a million plays and the rest with 1,000.
-For the tracks that don't get boosted by playlists, say they all get around 1,000 streams just from your hardcore fanbase, user playlists, etc. That adds up to a lot more when you have 50 ten track albums in a year instead of one.
-If you're putting out that amount of music the tracks are probably going to be short, which supposedly also helps in terms of what counts as a full play (can't remember if it's percentage-based or an absolute length at this point)

Style of music factors in a lot too, looking at the artist submission forms for their playlists made that abundantly clear. It's very much weighted toward 'moods', which is going to be mostly chill or inoffensive stuff.

I played a little bit of drums on an acquaintance's record this year, and he was saying that they've exclusively been releasing on Spotify because they do better there than on anything else. They don't do any online promotion to speak of, but somehow have a good relationship/luck when it comes to their playlists, and you can see it (some tracks have numbers in the hundreds of thousands/millions, the rest are just a few thousand). The music definitely sounds like Spotify music.

I've been wondering about that when it comes to Viper the Rapper, check him out on Spotify and you'll see a guy who is clearly gaming the system somehow

This article is old now Matt Farley is the king of this
https://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2014/jan/29/spotify-how-a-busy-songwriter-youve-never-heard-of-makes-it-work-for-him

are we talking strictly scamming? musicing in bad faith? is there a thread for styles becoming more viable due to the streaming model? we are in the midst of a lo fi chill study beats renaissance.

viper for real

I don't recommend you actually do it but if you actually listen to a few Viper albums it's pretty clear that a lot of his tunes are carbon copies of each other fiddled with just enough to avoid tripping Spotify's filter for duplicates

His thing was having a new album every day

I had a *terrible idea* for a while to just keep releasing songs with the same titles as the most streamed songs on Spotify, so that people would accidentally listen to my songs. Of course I think you have to get a certain number of seconds to actually count as a "play," so I don't know how much I'd actually get out of it.

I don't recommend you actually do it but if you actually listen to a few Viper albums it's pretty clear that a lot of his tunes are carbon copies of each other fiddled with just enough to avoid tripping Spotify's filter for duplicates

― frogbs, Tuesday, December 3, 2019 6:53 PM bookmarkflaglink

Those filters must have fun with doom acts

This stuff is the musical equivalent of just mining for stuff Warcraft to sell for money in the real world. The mob probably has some sweat shop of people banging on Casios and Fruityloops to put tunes up online somewhere. Got to have something to listen to when running your Bitcoin farm.

i wrote this a while back to support a completely unrelated (and silly) argument in another thread, but by and large i still agree with it

the relationship between the number of tracks and the amount of streams a project gets over the course of its commercial life has been vastly exaggerated by 'death of the album'-type coverage. the effect, when it does exist, is concentrated on the first week the record comes out, when more die-hards are listening.

though i do question that this relationship actually exists per the dominant view, i don't doubt that record labels operate under the assumption that it does, at least has in specific instances. and i suppose hands may be waved around the question as to whether that phenomenon is healthy for the album as a culturally relevant configuration, or as an artistic statement, or whatever.