Swedish rapper's experiment: Bought listeners on Spotify

The services that can increase the number of streams on music services that Spotify can mean from paying for a spot on a playlist with many followers to buying new followers or a certain number of listeners, which has caused hot discussions in the music industry.

Swedish rapper Mange Schmidt has followed the reporting, and then decided to test. Shortly after New Year, he chose to buy 100,000 streams of the song In the ghötto on one site. The flows would occur within 12-14 days, for which he paid SEK 5,000.

For Today's news, he shows how listening increases from 155 daily listeners to 4200 in a day. The time after, the song continues to be played around 5000 times a day, and has so far increased by about 80,000 listenings in total. He has shared the experiment on his social media to show his views on the problem.

- I want to draw attention to the issue. It's a big problem in the music industry - but the industry is nothing but the listeners. As a consumer, I would think this is fucking wrong, he tells the magazine.

Although he is a Swedish-speaking artist, listeners have come in from both Germany and the US, but according to Schmidt, neither Spotify nor any other company has any idea.

Now he wants to go ahead with the test by buying streaming again, but first keep Spotify out to challenge them.

- If they defend themselves after the first test by saying "We would have discovered this if you continued for two more weeks", then I would like to take it a step further and present them with an obvious challenge. I hope they do it. Because in that case, their system works to prevent fake streams, he says.

Mange Schmidt believes that the experiments are all about testing the system, and not about PR for him.

- I don't even have anything to do for PR right now. But if it should lead to PR, then it is pretty smartly done, I think. But you should not confuse the concepts. The services claim that they help you with promotion, but this is really cheating.

To Today's News, Spotify responds to the criticism:

“We have several measures and methods in place to monitor the use of our services to protect our users, and we work actively with our industry partners to tackle these issues. When we identify or become aware of unauthorized activity, we take action that may include removing streams, containing royalties, and measures to counteract the effect on placements on our leaderboards. We continue to work to remove incentives for unauthorized activity. "