Thread for musicians who are clearly trying to abuse streaming services

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.