A Bulgarian playlist-maker scammed the Spotify payout system and make monthly around 288.000 USD
And the best part? Probably didn’t break any laws in the process.
The ‘scam’ was first spotted by a major label executive in late September 2017
Two suspicious third-party playlists came to the attention of the major at this juncture – ‘Soulful Music’ and ‘Music From The Heart’.
Both of them were full of music attached to ISRC codes that linked back to an operation in Bulgaria.
On September 23, ‘Soulful Music’ and ‘Music From The Heart’ reached hitherto peak positions.
‘Music From The Heart’ sat at No.84 on Spotify’s global list, and No.22 on its US-only rankings.
‘Soulful Music’, meanwhile, was smashing it.
It climbed to No.35 on Spotify’s confidential global chart (up 29 places) and – unbelievably – at No.11 in the US.
Both of these positions for ‘Soulful Music’ (global and US) were higher than any major-label owned playlist.
At the time, Soulful Music contained 467 tracks, all recorded by seemingly unknown artists with very little in the way of online biographies/presence.
You will note: this is an exceedingly large number of tracks for a playlist knocking on the door of Spotify’s Top 10 revenue-making playlists in America.
Even stranger: bewilderingly few people ‘followed’ the playlist.
According to data obtained using the playlist monitoring platform ChartMetric, MBW has discovered that during the third week of September 2017, just 1,797 people followed ‘Soulful Music’.
What’s more, we’re told the vast majority of these 467 tracks were barely over 30 seconds long; the minimum unit of time needed to trigger a monetized play on Spotify.
The story becomes even more intriguing when you dig into how many people were actually playing these tracks.
The average track duration of the 467 songs in Soulful Music was 43 seconds. (The top third of the playlist – the most visible bit – actually contained the longest tracks, presumably so that, at a glance, it appeared like the list could be legit.)
There are 86,400 seconds in a day.
The potential amount of total ‘listens’ that a single individual premium Spotify account could rack up within this playlist across a 30-day month? If they were playing songs continually, 24 hours a day, seven days a week?
Just over 60,000.
60,000 monetised tracks ‘listens’ across 1,200 premium accounts in the same month period?
A total of 72 million plays.
A conservative estimate of Spotify’s per-track average payout to recorded music rights-holders is $0.004 per play.
Multiplied by 72 million, and you get the potential monthly payout of the ‘Soulful Music’ scam.
$288.000
If we make the full count from september our friend make over 1.6 million USD
What’s most mind-boggling here isn’t actually that Spotify may have in any way been defrauded by The Bulgarian. Because, as we pointed out, technically this person needn’t have broken any laws.
Ultimately, all of these accounts were being paid for. Therefore, in terms of Spotify’s business, the company gained the appropriate amount of income and subscribers.