Spotify recommended me a 'silent song' last week and it was just 3 minutes of dead air

I was cooking dinner last Tuesday and my Discover Weekly had this track called 'Ambient 1' or something. I let it play thinking it was building up to something. Nope. Just silence. Checked the artist and they had like 12 albums of this same thing. Kinda wild how the algorithm just threw it in there. Has anyone else gotten weird empty tracks suggested to them?

2 comments

2 Comments

gracecarr9d ago

Actually there's a pretty good chance it's not even a real artist pushing content, could be a glitch where the audio file got corrupted or didn't upload right. Happens more than people think. I've had a few tracks over the years that were supposed to be actual music but just played back as static or dead air because the encoding went wrong somewhere. The artist with 12 albums of silence though, that's definitely someone gaming the system. People do this to get their catalog numbers up and trick the algorithm into recommending them more. It's like SEO spam but for music. Weird part is that Spotify's system actually picked it up and served it to you, which means their detection tools don't really check for actual audio content.

blair_davis509d ago

Is it really that common for corrupted files to slip through though? I've uploaded a ton of music to different services over the years and never had a track come out as dead air or static, encoding problems always get caught before they go live. It feels more likely someone is purposely uploading silence to manipulate the system, not that their upload tools are that broken across the board.