BBC:
Mysterious musicians have cropped up on Spotify, racking up thousands of listens and (perhaps) hundreds of pounds. It’s a phenomenon that experts say could indicate a security flaw.
But while Spotify denies that accounts have been hacked, the music streaming site has not explained in detail how the playlists of some users indicate they’ve “listened to” musicians that nobody’s ever heard of.
And:
Many listeners (including this reporter) never actively searched for or played tracks by bands like Bergenulo Five, but found that their music ended up being logged in their listening history anyway.
The BBC asked Spotify for contact details for the artists in question. It declined, and all of our attempts to contact the bands were met with silence. But within a few days of our query, most of the mystery artists had disappeared from the music streaming site.
Amazing story. This does sound like account hacking or, at the very least, hacking of Spotify’s master database. How else to explain non-existent artists mysteriously appearing on people’s listening history?
My guess is fictitious bands used for testing that accidentally made it into the production site.
How else to explain? Spotify itself is cheating and got caught. How else do you explain their silence? If they were honest, they would be out there yelling at the top of their lungs that they were hacked.
I don’t mean to imply that management were in on any potential cheating mind you. But employees are caught doing stuff like this in most industries. Paying an insider to do the job could even be sabotage.
Occam’s Razor. An intern tried to do some database maintenance and munged the data while doing it Nothing to see here.