The Digital Forensics Report from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology has more information, describing how they used statistical analysis to determine that there has in fact been manipulation of the playback number data at particular times, and shows the python code they used.
DN is a financial newspaper in Norway, pretty important and trusted, if slanted towards "business" points of view.
NTNU is the second biggest university in Norway, focuses on science, and is well-regarded.
DN somehow aquired some files that purports to be logs of songs played in Tidal. The numbers in those logs seems to match up with other reported numbers, but Tidal denies the logs are genuine.
Researchers at NTNU analyzed the logs, and found that if they are genuine, then data was manipulated to boost play numbers for Kanye West's and and Beyonce's albums.
> Another TIDAL subscriber, music critic Geir Rakvaag, supposedly played tracks from Kanye West’s The Life Of Pablo 96 times in a single day – with 54 plays in the middle of the night.
>“It’s physically impossible,” he says.
>The list goes on.
The sql query that generated all those fake listens shouldn't have passed QA. /s
Is he using "physically impossible" for emphasis or is it really physically impossible for him to have listened to the track 96 times in a day? Because according to Wikipedia the longest track on that album is "No More Parties in LA" whose duration is 6:14 so it would take just under 10 hours to play it 96 times in a row. If you use shorter tracks and depending how short a play should be to count (I assume you don't have to listen from start to finish to count?) you could be done much faster. "I Love Kanye" is only 44 second long for instance. I wouldn't be surprised if some die-hard Kanye West fans had listened to more than 96 of his tracks in a day.
What if he simply put the album on repeat and left it running somewhere by mistake? There are 20 tracks in the album for a total length of 66:39, on repeat you'll rich 96 tracks played in a little over 5 hours. It doesn't sound implausible if it plays in the background while doing chores or other things. That would explain the plays during the night as well if he left it running on a muted computer.
Not that it invalidates the rest of the study or that it would surprise me if somebody had tinkered with the numbers, I just thought that it was a bit sloppy to use "physically impossible" when it's just "unlikely".
I once turned down the volume for a streaming service one evening probably to talk to a friend. The playlist played through the night and well into the next evening. Depending on the playlist, some tracks could have gotten 15+ plays due to absent-mindedness.
I can definitely see a music critic putting together short playlists (e.g. 3 songs) for work on a specific album, article, or project. 3 songs at 3.5 minutes each in a playlist would take 10.5 minutes to play and loop 5.714 per hour. You could get 96 plays out of all 3 tracks by continuously looping the playlist 16.8 times.
Again, I'm not saying the numbers aren't inflated, but it's possible for some of these to be false-positives.
Perhaps they meant the entire album was played 96 times. 66:39 x 96.
I myself am a serial song repeater. I use it a lot for focus. Noise to drown out other sounds, but familiarity so I don't start thinking about the music instead of work.
The engineer that got told to fake data probably was not overly enthusiastic about the task. Maybe it is even the same guy who leaked the harddrive to the newspaper.
Tangential: Google's recently released Duplex claims to mimic natural conversation, yet there is not a single translation service that does not sound like a village idiot.
> "Several Tidal customers who have been confronted with these logs pretend to have played songs by the artists as many times as illuminated."
Is translation so much harder, or simply not a priority, or are all the claims about neural networks and language processing exaggerated?
current tech can translate decently a sentence, but a sentence has no context so if there's a double meaning, it becomes a matter of probability to obtain a correct translation.
i.e. "I never said she stole my money"
there are 7 possible meaning conveyed by stress alone, which will need to be translated differently.
also current tech has limits when translating whole pages. paragraphs introduce context and meaning that's later referenced. sentence by sentence translation is bound to lose all of that info along the way. I don't think current neural network used in mapping translations have enough complexity to keep context as they go. they might get there eventually alone as the computer scale or with the help of preprocessors.
Yes, I am not disputing that they lied. What interests me is that we have so many unverified, and unverifiable sources of truth. If Apple just turned round and said "whoops, we were off by 2% for the past 5 years", would we know? If it was off by 200% there would be a lot of rumours and questions, but 2, 5, 10%?
An important thing to take into consideration here is that both Beyonce and Kanye West own significant amounts of stock in Tidal. So there is a conflict of interest here. Tidal has marketed itself as the streaming service that first and foremost cater to musicians without trying to screw them over.
Surely AI is an idea application for rooting out issues with data and identifying possible fraud. Since TIDAL reports its numbers to the record companies the onus should be on them to verify the numbers as realistic. Surely they also have the true subscriber numbers to go with the number of times something is played.
The real sticking point here is the music industry has many untouchable characters in it, witness how #METOO barely if at all can make a dent in it especially the rap music side. so unless some other artists who have real pull can show they have lost real money this will get buried. There is a story Kayne West is after TIDAL for money but how far is he willing to buck that system?
I suspect that AI is not a good fit - the (public) datasets are too small here (all anyone knew previously was that one record label got charged X for Y downloads).
Plus the dataset is tainted - it's not trying to spot if people have been pretend listening to beyoncé songs, and picking their trees from the forest, it's that every tree in the forest has been artificially raised up. If you don't know that how AI tell?
maybe this is ironic and whooshed over my head but blockchains don't change human behaviour. While play count is an important metric that is shown and people bias their viewing behaviour there is no way to solve manipulating inflated numbers for profit.
Notice how kanyewest.com loads some analytics scripts multiple times. I think inflating stats might be part of "the game". Like renting expensive things for videos used to.
https://www.dn.no/staticprojects/special/2018/05/09/0600/dok...