This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.Spotify's problem with fake artists has been reported since last year and doesn't seem to be letting up any time soon. Scammers now seem to be outsmarting the streaming giant, despite the company's efforts to counter illegitimacy across the platform.On Tuesday, Music Business Worldwide published a report alleging that a shadowy figure based in Bulgaria is thought to have started two playlists, "Soulful Music" and "Music From the Heart" made up of short, fake songs that barely ran over Spotify's mandated monetized play time of 30 seconds. These playlists, however, according to MBW, climbed Spotify's confidential weekly charts, despite a suspiciously low number of subscribers. "Soulful Music," for example, only had just under 1,800. So how did the playlists do so well?Well, if guesses are correct, the same person or organization who started the playlists was also running a large number of premium Spotify accounts via which to listen to the playlists at basically all hours of the day. This would require a considerable outlay, but the returns were probably even more considerable—again, according to MBW's math, listens to the "Soulful Music" playlist could have generated almost $300,000 USD in a month. The scam, playing out across two playlists, therefore, could have made more than a cool $1 million USD in the four month period during which it was up and running. And it's technically not even illegal.But labels are pissed, and though Spotify haven't commented on whether or not this report is accurate, they did say, via MBW's report:We take the artificial manipulation of streaming activity on our service extremely seriously. Spotify has multiple detection measures in place monitoring consumption on the service to detect, investigate and deal with such activity.We are continuing to invest heavily in refining those processes and improving methods of detection and removal, and reducing the impact of this unacceptable activity on legitimate creators, rights holders and our users.There you have it. Kind of sounds like a heist movie, if heist movies starred nerds who want to stick it to Big Streaming.Follow Noisey on Twitter.
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