r/Music • u/Kaiser_Allen • Jun 28 '25

music "There's not a shred of evidence on the internet that this band has ever existed": This apparently AI-generated artist is racking up hundreds of thousands of Spotify streams

https://www.musicradar.com/music-tech/theres-not-a-shred-of-evidence-on-the-internet-that-this-band-has-ever-existed-this-apparently-ai-generated-artist-is-racking-up-hundreds-of-thousands-of-spotify-streams
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u/Bludypoo Jun 28 '25

Why not? It's the ads the make revenue; a bot hitting play on the song is still receiving the ads.

43

u/ab216 Jun 28 '25

CPA / CAC for advertisers will be high since traffic / conversions will be low and they’ll figure it’s due to Spotify and drop spend

20

u/QuintoBlanco Jun 28 '25

As an advertiser: companies like Spotify don't really care about this. Part of the problem is that buying ads on Spotify and YouTube et cetera is often outsourced and automated.

The number of people who actually analyze the effectiveness of these ad campaigns is low, because the main selling point of advertising on these services is how easy it is, plus everyone is doing it, so it's low risk from the personal perspective of the employees making the decisions.

And you can always buy a dodgy market research report that states that brand awareness is up because of these ads.

14

u/Boulderdrip Jun 28 '25

i work in advertising. it’s all bullshit and no one knows what they are doing.

2

u/Surreal__blue Jun 29 '25

Sounds like a work AI could be doing...

2

u/Nuxij Jun 29 '25

Except Rory Sutherland he seems to know

1

u/Bongoisnthere Jun 28 '25

That and it looks good for quarterly profits and investors.

“We had x number of listeners listening to royalty free music that we collect 100% of profits from” sounds pretty attractive to investors

1

u/Sensitive-Tone5279 Jun 29 '25

If I were an advertiser and putting real actual money towards promoting my business, I wouldn't advertise on Spotify if N number of "listeners" were bots.