Man Arrested for Creating Fake Bands With AI, Then Making $10 Million by Listening to Their Songs With Bots

So corporations use ai and bots themselves in order to inflate their stats and steal money from investors and share holders(see Reddit) and its all cool. Someone does that but it costs the corporation some money. Straight to jail.

Seriously, how has the reddit IPO which was offered to users not been a fraudulent scheme due to the website statistics being based on genuine user interaction with no mention of auto reposting or bots that are either operated by or hired by reddit?

It genuinely seems like the next ponzi scheme but that would require so many federal agencies that stopped giving shit and learning how the world works to see any peep into that business.

But what do I know, I'm just some average Joe that gets audited over a $300 mistake on annual taxs which I have to pay a private third party more than that to do.

impacts small indie artists

How?

I read the article but I don't understand how bots making and listening to songs to generate royalties for the bot owners affects anyone but the royalty-payers?

Agreed. As a person that has released music, I hate this guy and would like the book thrown at him and anyone mass releasing shitty AI music.. It might not be a big corpo doing it, but it's still fucking creatives over.

it also impacts small indie artists just trying to earn enough from each play to get to eat.

I'm sorry but it's the 21st century, even small indie artists can have their own sites nowadays or, heck, use bandcamp, sellaband... you can't really use technological complexity as an excuse to depend on fat middlemen.

Take it this way, if 1 person pays 10$ a month for Spotify and gets about 50 hours of music out of it, it's more beneficial for Spotify if a significant portion of that time is spent on music they pump into the playlists themselves, which costed them pennies to make, instead of having that user listen to real artists, that will ask for actual pay in exchange for their streams. They're not paying a little bit to make alot, they're paying a little bit to avoid paying even more. It's basically average desk job employee outsourcing their work to indians who get like a dollar a day and are happy with it cus it's their only option

They don't pay equally to everyone. They benefit large artists more than smaller ones. If you only listen to your totally unknown friend's music on Spotify, most of your money will still go to popular artists you don't listen to, and your friend will get nothing because they're below the threshold of getting a payment. It's basically theft. Now if some of those popular artists are Spotify themselves behind the scenes, guess where your money is being funneled.

Probably they find net zero (minus cost of hiring musicians) preferred over paying out a moderate income to actual artists. Capitalism at its finest.

i understand entirely, it just felt like a good opportunity to say how spotify is trying to enlarge their size of the moneypie by eating out of hardworking musician's cut and simultaneously filling user's playlists with bloat

Yeah I have no sympathy for advertisers, but this seems like it’s pretty clearly fraud.

Fuck 'em