本文揭示了Spotify上利用SEO技巧的音乐“艺术家”如何通过精心选择名字、关键词优化和重复上传获取流量，以实现每月可观收入。这些策略包括模仿热门音乐类别、使用模糊的子流派标签，以及利用平台的推荐算法。尽管Spotify并未公开禁止此类行为，但它们与平台的营销目标并不完全吻合。
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Welcome to The Cheater’s Guide to Spotify, a series about the schemes that rack up streams, money, and infamy on the popular streaming service.
欢迎使用The Sheater's Guide to Spotify ，这是一系列有关在流行的流媒体服务上串流，浪费金钱和诽谤的计划的系列。
You’ve probably never heard of them, but Relaxing Music Therapy has had a pretty damn successful music career. At least, on Spotify.
Ÿou've可能从来没有听说过他们，但轻松的音乐疗法已经有一个非常成功的该死的音乐生涯。 至少在Spotify上。
This “artist” has more than 500,000 monthly listeners on the platform, all thanks to One Simple Trick: optimizing their name to show up prominently in Spotify’s search results.
这位“艺术家”在平台上每月有500,000多个听众，这要归功于One Simple Trick：优化其名称，使其在Spotify的搜索结果中突出显示。
Spotify is full of “artists” like this: Pro Sound Effects Library, On Hold Music, Yoga, Jazz Music Therapy for Cats, and Natural White Noise Best Nature Sounds for Sleeping, Stress Relief, Relaxation, Sound Therapy.
Spotify的是十足的“艺术家的”这样的：专业音效库，保留音乐，瑜伽，爵士音乐治疗的猫，和天然白噪声最佳天籁的睡眠，缓解压力，放松，声音疗法。
While the platform pays only in the neighborhood of a third of a penny per stream if you’re not Drake, it boasts more than a quarter-billion active users. So, if your music ranks highly for a search term, you can accumulate enough listens to steadily make hundreds, in some cases thousands, of dollars a month with minimal effort.
如果您不是Drake的朋友，该平台每次流支付的费用仅为三分之一，但它拥有超过25亿活跃用户。 因此，如果您的音乐在搜索词中的排名很高，则可以积累足够的收听量，从而每月花费最少的精力稳定地赚取数百美元(有时甚至是数千美元)。
The key to success is to find a phony artist name that Spotify users are likely to type into search. Like Relaxing Music Therapy, some of these “artists” use names inspired by an adjective commonly used to describe music. Others name themselves after popular uses for certain kinds of music, well-known generic tunes like children’s rhymes, or entire music genres. Often, these creators optimize further by titling tracks and albums with related words and reuploading the same songs ad nauseum, which can look especially absurd when filtering to see just a single tune. Relaxing Music Therapy, for instance, has uploaded the track “Stream in the Forest With Rain” 616 times to date.
成功的关键是找到Spotify用户可能会在搜索中键入的伪造艺术家姓名。 像“放松音乐疗法”一样，其中一些“艺术家”使用的名称是受通常用来描述音乐的形容词启发的。 其他人则以某些音乐的流行用法，诸如儿童押韵的众所周知的通用音乐或整个音乐流派来命名自己。 通常，这些创作者可以通过在曲目和专辑中添加相关词的标题并重新上传相同的歌曲作为广告作进一步的优化，而这些内容在进行过滤以仅查看单曲时显得尤为荒谬。 例如，轻松音乐疗法迄今为止已将曲目“带雨的森林流”上载了616次。
SEO spam and its various streambait cousins fit right in with Spotify’s own marketing strategy of being a one-stop shop for “music for any mood,” rather than, say, a hub that highlights the most talented artists. In 2017, the trade publication Music Business Worldwide revealed that Spotify’s curated playlists were filled with artists working under platform-specific pseudonyms, such as “Charles Bolt,” with no off-internet presence at all. (The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this article.)
SEO垃圾邮件及其各种表弟都与Spotify自己的营销策略恰如其分，该营销策略是一站式商店，“为任何情绪提供音乐”，而不是例如一个展示最有才华的艺术家的枢纽。 2017年，商业出版物Music Business Worldwide披露，Spotify策划的播放列表中充斥着使用特定于平台的假名(例如“ Charles Bolt”)工作的艺术家，根本没有互联网的存在。 (该公司未回应对本文的多次评论请求。)
George Howard, an associate professor of music business and management at Berklee College of Music and founder of strategic consulting firm GHS, is well aware of the Spotify SEO strategy. “Spotify… has managed, through a whole series of UX [decisions], to make the vast majority of their listeners decouple the creator of the music from the product of that creation,” Howard told OneZero. “What entrepreneurs have done is go, ‘Okay, we’ll SEO it. We’ll think in terms in terms of the user and how he or she is searching for music.’”
伯克利音乐学院音乐业务与管理副教授，战略咨询公司GHS的创始人乔治·霍华德(George Howard)非常了解Spotify SEO策略。 霍华德告诉OneZero： “ Spotify通过一系列的UX(决策)管理，使他们的绝大多数听众都将音乐的创造者与创造的产品脱钩。” “企业家所做的就是去，'好吧，我们将对其进行搜索。 我们将根据用户以及用户搜索音乐的方式来考虑。””
SubmitMusic founder Jason Cerf is one of these shrewd uploaders. His company buys musical recordings from individual producers and artists across genres and then “positions them to be monetized,” a process that includes working with clients to pick streaming-friendly artist names, track names, and album art. He isn’t quite putting out songs under blatantly eyebrow-raising aliases like Halloween Party Scary Sounds and Fx, but a similarly tactical approach is important to the bottom line of SubmitMusic’s catalog, which Cerf estimates to be around 10,000 songs.
SubmitMusic创始人Jason Cerf是这些精明的上传者之一。 他的公司从各个流派的制作人和艺术家那里购买唱片，然后“将它们定位为获利”，该过程包括与客户一起挑选流媒体友好的艺术家姓名，曲目名称和专辑封面。 他倒不扑灭歌曲像下公然眉募集别名万圣节可怕的声音和FX ，但同样的战术方法是SubmitMusic的目录的底线，这瑟夫估计是大约10,000首歌曲重要。
“We have a creative team who develop at scale metadata strategies,” Cerf told OneZero. “We have brainstorming sessions where we come up with artist names that will probably be recognized as ‘on brand’ or possibly, you could say, generic.”
“我们谁大规模的元数据策略制定创意团队，”瑟夫告诉OneZero。 “我们进行了集思广益的会议，提出了艺术家的名字，这些名字可能会被认为是'品牌上的'，或者可能是通用的。”
How this strategy manifests itself depends on the content. “If you name [yourself] ‘Joe Smith,’ and you put out a classical music album, it’s not going to resonate with a digital consumer. If you put out classical music under the name ‘Classique Elegante,’ that is an on-brand piece of data that is put up in front and center… and is likely going to harbor more digital activity, or clicks.”
这个策略如何表现出来取决于内容。 “如果您(自己)命名为“乔·史密斯(Joe Smith)”，并且发行了古典音乐专辑，那将不会引起数字消费者的共鸣。 如果您以“ Classique Elegante”的名称发布古典音乐，那是放在前部和中间的品牌数据片段，并且可能会包含更多的数字活动或点击。”
Gaming SEO is particularly effective if the goal is simply to monetize some preexisting catalog of music, without any aim to actually build a following, throw a concert, or push a genre forward. Even if a user ends up becoming a fan of the music after inadvertently discovering it, there’s often no way to find the musician outside of the Spotify platform, as the artists’ name itself and accompanying metadata are just SEO word salad.
如果SEO的目标只是为了通过某种形式的现有音乐进行货币化，而又没有旨在真正建立追随者，举办音乐会或推动音乐流派前进的目标，则SEO尤其有效。 即使用户最终在无意间发现了音乐迷之后，通常也无法在Spotify平台之外找到音乐家，因为艺术家的名字本身和附带的元数据只是SEO字眼。
Cerf says he does not go so far as to name artists in ways that are misleading. While there’s no codified rule from Spotify against SEO bait, he says he’s heard from contacts at digital distributors that Spotify generally discourages the practice. Though distributors on Spotify’s preferred list, which the company recommends directly, are more likely to follow these suggestions, it’s clear others aren’t, to a significant degree.
瑟夫说，他只不过以误导他人的方式来命名艺术家。 尽管Spotify并没有针对SEO诱饵制定规则，但他表示，从数字发行商的联系人那里得知，Spotify通常会阻止这种做法。 尽管该公司直接推荐的Spotify首选列表中的发行商更有可能遵循这些建议，但显然其他人在很大程度上并没有这样做。
Ask Google to play “relaxing music,” or plug “meditation” into Spotify’s search bar, and you’ll find heaps of artist accounts with names like Binaural Beats Sleep, Nature Sounds Nature Music, and Air Conditioner Sound that mass-upload ambient drones, looped chord progressions, or straight-up white noise. Spotify’s user base apparently has a lot of trouble sleeping, and that significant audience interest makes it a worthwhile hustle for a prospective SEO spammer. It also doesn’t hurt that generic New Age sonic compositions are relatively easy to make (or rip) compared to other types of music.
要求Google播放“轻松的音乐”，或将“冥想”插入Spotify的搜索栏中，您会发现大量艺术家帐户，其名称包括Binaural Beats Sleep ， Nature Sounds Nature Music和Air Conditioner Sound ，它们可以大量上传周围的无人机，和弦进行循环或白噪声直起。 Spotify的用户群显然在入睡方面遇到很多麻烦，并且巨大的受众兴趣使其成为潜在的SEO垃圾邮件发送者的不二之选。 与其他类型的音乐相比，通用的New Age声音作品相对容易制作(或翻录)，这也没有什么坏处。
And so a seemingly unending stream of “artists” battle in an audio turf war over various niches of faintly wellness-related audio. These profiles often have dozens to hundreds of albums, each saturated with keywords. Individual pages using this method regularly rack up tens to hundreds of thousands of monthly plays. Some daisy-chain featured artists in their metadata to populate multiple pages with slightly different names, while others simply reupload the same exact tracks over and over again in repackaged albums.
因此，一场看似永无止境的“艺术家”之争正在一场音频草皮战中，与各种与健康相关的音频领域ni之以鼻。 这些个人资料通常有数十到数百张专辑，每张专辑都充满了关键字。 使用此方法的各个页面通常每月累积数万至数十万次播放。 一些菊花链在其元数据中以艺术家为特色，以用略有不同的名称填充多个页面，而其他人则只是在重新包装的专辑中一遍又一遍地重新上传相同的确切曲目。
Another tack involves bare-bones versions of popular, generic, kid-centric songs like “Happy Birthday.” In fact, the “artist” Happy Birthday alone has uploaded hundreds upon hundreds of the same dozenish versions of the tune (done in different styles, from EDM to acoustic), racking up more than 140,000 monthly listeners. Another account, Children’s Music, is up to nearly 300,000 monthly listeners by sharing misspelled classics like “Wheel on the Bus” and “If Your Happy and You Know It” over and over again.
另一种方法是将流行，通用，以孩子为中心的歌曲的准系统版本，例如“生日快乐”。 实际上，仅“艺术家”生日快乐就上传了数百首相同的曲调版本(从EDM到声学，以不同的风格完成)，每月听众超过14万。 另一个帐户( Children's Music )可以一次又一次地共享错误拼写的经典作品，例如“车轮上的车轮”和“如果您的快乐和您知道它”，则每月有将近30万的听众。
Some “artist” profiles have named themselves after entire subgenres of music, some of which might not have a dedicated genre page or clearly labeled Spotify-created playlist. “Lofi Chillhop” and “LoFi Chill” (both verified artists) seem to be competing for fans of a certain type of instrumental music that experienced a recent rebirth thanks in part to a meme, hitting more than 100,000 and 40,000 monthly listeners, respectively, by uploading beats of unknown origin. The verified artist profile “Uk Drill” took advantage of rising interest in the British hip-hop scene by simply ripping and reposting tracks from up-and-coming MCs, reaching more than 80,000 monthly listeners. And whoever is behind the account “Witch House” (a spooky mid-aughts style of electronic music) accumulated a trickle of traffic by uploading generic instrumentals and jamming the names of popular EDM songs, albums, and artists into the tracks’ metadata. Witch House’s music itself isn’t even witch house, but rather intentionally mislabeled tracks ripped off from places like obscure instrumental sampler albums.
一些“艺术家”个人资料是以整个音乐子流派命名的，其中一些可能没有专用的流派页面或没有明确标记的Spotify创建的播放列表。 “ Lofi Chillhop ”和“ LoFi Chill ”(都是经过验证的艺术家)似乎正在争夺某种乐器音乐的粉丝，这些乐迷最近经历了重生，这在一定程度上是由于一种模因，每月分别吸引了100,000和40,000的听众，通过上传来历不明的节拍。 经过验证的艺术家个人资料“ Uk Drill”通过简单地翻录和重新发布即将到来的MC的曲目，充分利用了对英国嘻哈音乐的浓厚兴趣，每月听众超过80,000。 谁拥有“ Witch House” (怪异的中风电子音乐风格)帐户，谁就会上传上来的乐器并将流行的EDM歌曲，专辑和艺术家的名字塞入曲目的元数据中，从而积累了少量的流量。 巫婆屋的音乐本身甚至都不是巫婆屋，而是故意从错误的乐器采样器专辑之类的地方窃取了标签错误的曲目。
There isn’t really an incentive for Spotify to clean up repetitive tracks or bizarre artist names. In a way, these prolific posters are just executing an extreme version of Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s vision of a world where artists spend less time on their music and focus more on volume. The platform’s own goal, as Liz Pelly wrote in The Baffler in 2017, is (arguably) to “fit music snugly into an emotional regulation capsule optimized for maximum clicks.”
Spotify真的没有动力清理重复的曲目或离奇的艺术家姓名。 从某种意义上说，这些多产的海报只是在执行Spotify首席执行官Daniel Ek对世界的愿景，即艺术家在音乐上花费的时间更少，而对音量的关注更多。 正如Liz Pelly在2017年在《 The Baffler》上写道，该平台的目标(可以说)是“将音乐紧贴地放入一个情绪调节胶囊中，以实现最大点击量”。
Cerf, for instance, views what he’s doing as a useful utilitarian tool. “People want to be able to search for music not just by artist name, but also by keyword,” he said. “They want to say, ‘Oh, I’m sleeping, or I’m driving, or I’m meditating, or I have a kid and he needs to sleep, or I just need background music.’”
例如，瑟夫(Cerf)将他的工作视为一种有用的功利工具。 他说：“人们不仅希望能够通过艺术家姓名来搜索音乐，而且还能够通过关键字来搜索音乐。” “他们想说，'哦，我在睡觉，或者我在开车，或者我正在冥想，或者我有一个孩子，他需要睡觉，或者我只需要背景音乐。'”
Indeed, a fundamental building block of Spotify’s algorithm is to simply recognize when a listener successfully finds what they were looking for, not whether or not the music was “quality” per se. As a 2017 Vulture article points out, these artists “are providing people exactly what they want. It just so happens that what they want is ephemeral nonsense.”
确实，Spotify算法的基本组成部分是简单地识别出听众何时成功找到他们想要的东西，而不是识别音乐本身是否是“质量”。 正如2017年Vulture的一篇文章指出的那样，这些艺术家“正在为人们提供他们想要的东西。 碰巧的是，他们想要的只是短暂的废话。”
Still, some music in this vein is downright deceptive, either of noticeably low quality or having little to no connection to the given artist title.
尽管如此，有些音乐仍是彻头彻尾的欺骗，要么质量低下，要么与给定的艺术家头衔几乎没有关系。
Tools like digital music distributor and Spotify partner DistroKid’s DistroLock audio fingerprint technology and Spotify’s own blockchain startup acquisitions could in theory curb some of this spam by, say, limiting reuploads of the same tracks. But these kinds of checks aren’t yet baked into Spotify’s platform.
从理论上讲，数字音乐发行商和Spotify合作伙伴DistroKid的DistroLock音频指纹技术以及Spotify自己的区块链初创公司之类的工具可以通过限制相同曲目的重载来抑制这种垃圾邮件。 但是这些检查尚未纳入Spotify的平台。
Increased human moderation of Spotify’s library could offer another solution, but this presents a logistical problem because of the sheer scope of the platform’s catalog. (The platform says it adds tens of thousands of songs to its catalog every day.)
增加人为管理Spotify库的能力可能会提供另一种解决方案，但是由于平台目录的绝对范围，这带来了后勤问题。 (该平台表示每天都会向其目录添加数万首歌曲。)
Spotify’s editorial team functionally runs interference on certain terms people frequently game by essentially using the same strategy as the spammers, creating official pages for certain “Genres & Moods” of music, each featuring handpicked playlists within these categorizations. However, it’s unclear who on Spotify’s editorial team makes these pages, what process they use to create them, and whether their explicit purpose is to get out in front of spam. These official Spotify pages and playlists sometimes surface high in search, but they often have a lot of competition from artists named with almost every imaginable variation of a set of high-value terms. Plus, spammers themselves occasionally show up in the sanctioned playlists, often joined by plenty of the less intrusive fake artists.
Spotify的编辑团队从本质上使用与垃圾邮件发送者相同的策略，对人们经常使用的某些字词进行干扰，为某些音乐的“流派和心情”创建官方页面，每个页面均包含精选的播放列表。 但是，尚不清楚Spotify编辑团队中的哪些人制作这些页面，他们使用什么流程来创建这些页面，以及它们的明确目的是否是为了摆脱垃圾邮件。 这些官方的Spotify页面和播放列表有时会在搜索中占据较高的位置，但它们经常受到来自艺术家的竞争，这些艺术家的名字几乎都是每组可以想到的高价值术语的变体。 另外，垃圾邮件发送者自己有时会出现在受制裁的播放列表中，通常还包括许多不那么打扰的假艺术家。
Howard isn’t aggrieved by people gaming the platform to get their music heard, and he highlights that people using these strategies are simply working within a broken system.
霍华德对在平台上玩游戏以听见音乐的人并不感到委屈，他着重指出，使用这些策略的人们只是在一个破碎的系统中工作。
“The tech is agnostic,” he says. “You’d be stupid not to use [Spotify’s] system to your advantage, and so people are just gaming the system. I can speak for savvy operators in the publishing world who go, ‘I’ve got all this content. I’m going to optimize it for plays.’ And they’re doing the right thing!”
他说：“这项技术是不可知的。” “如果您不使用[Spotify]系统会很愚蠢，那么人们只是在玩这个系统。 我可以代表出版界的精明运营商说：“我拥有所有这些内容。 我将针对游戏进行优化。 他们在做正确的事！”
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