No, because here to listen to music on Spotify you pay a subscription price. You're paying Spotify to download music, they're paying you to upload music. There's an arbitrage in that pricing model which means you can pay less to down load than you earn from upload. There's no reason that should be possible. It's only like that because they're burning investor money to fund it.
The answer is for Spotify to properly manage downloading so that people who download music are actually paying for it.
If you need 100 accounts to download 1,000,000 plays then whatever Spotify has to payout for those plays has to come from those 100 accounts. Whether those accounts are bots or actual people doesn't change the irrationality and going-to-zeroness in the business model.
EDIT: Unless they're using ad-funded free-to-play accounts, which is more of a problem. Specifying exactly what the fraud is here is difficult. They arent providing music deceptively, they arent fraudently downloading it -- it may be against TOS, but spotify isnt being sold anything in that download. If there's some sort of hybrid-way of talking about fraud here, its really across both actions (uploading knowing that users wont listen to ads?) and (downloading without listening to ads?).
It comes down to exactly what transaction terms we think are implied in the upload. You're not selling something to spotify. Likewise, when you download, you arent buying anything.
The answer is for Spotify to properly manage downloading so that people who download music are actually paying for it.
If you need 100 accounts to download 1,000,000 plays then whatever Spotify has to payout for those plays has to come from those 100 accounts. Whether those accounts are bots or actual people doesn't change the irrationality and going-to-zeroness in the business model.
EDIT: Unless they're using ad-funded free-to-play accounts, which is more of a problem. Specifying exactly what the fraud is here is difficult. They arent providing music deceptively, they arent fraudently downloading it -- it may be against TOS, but spotify isnt being sold anything in that download. If there's some sort of hybrid-way of talking about fraud here, its really across both actions (uploading knowing that users wont listen to ads?) and (downloading without listening to ads?).
It comes down to exactly what transaction terms we think are implied in the upload. You're not selling something to spotify. Likewise, when you download, you arent buying anything.