Is it money laundering in that "dirty" money pays for the bots that rack up the streams, which generates "clean" money paid from Spotify to the fake artist?
ok so the problem for the money launderer is that as spotify gets better at detecting bots and spam accounts they will have to pay increasing amounts of dirty money to get out clean money, at what point does it become a losing proposition to them, that is to say when this form of money laundering is less efficient than older forms?
A bigger problem would be that Spotify pays very little. And to have the bot "listen" to a song (to be eligible for payment) takes minutes of streaming, which turns to tons of time and a big bandwidth bill, since they'll need to do thousands of them in parallel...
it's obviously worthwhile for them now to do this, but sure it is an additional cost that at some point will make it not worth doing.
This is where malware run bots come into picture ... it solves a lot of problem like not having to pay for bandwidth, evading detection by distributing access to the songs among varied IP and geography, etc.
They wouldn't have to actually play the songs, could just use the offline listening reporting endpoints.
Like an airgap for money
What is the money efficiency of that?
It's not about efficiency, it's about avoiding getting caught for criminal acts. Since criminals don't pay taxes on their earnings and don't have to pay for all sorts of things others do, they're already more "efficient"
Sure, but if you're going through a distribution service that has a 60/40 split with Spotify, are you going to be okay with 40% of your laundered proceeds getting eaten by Spotify? How does that compare to other laundering opportunities? And that's not even counting the costs imposed by your distributer. For example, if you have 1,000 tracks, on TuneCore that's $10,000 dollars just for track distribution, as well as a $50 per-album yearly fee. It does seem somewhat inefficient, and very easy for Spotify to notice and crack down on. (But they don't have a lot of incentive to look too closely, since they're getting paid handsomely for it...)
Diversification, I guess? Having multiple concurrent laundering streams, so if one dies, the rest can keep going?