Member-only story
Here’s a Kinda Genius, Kinda Evil Way People Are Gaming Spotify Playlists
It’s just the latest trick in a long history of hacking digital music services to promote your own songs
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.
Last week, I couldn’t get the retro song from the Joker’s first teaser trailer out of my head. So I popped “Joker soundtrack” into Spotify’s search box, clicked the top result, and browsed the resulting playlist until I found the track: Jimmy Durante’s version of “Smile,” an absolute banger from 1965.
As I went back to whatever I was doing, I kept the playlist rolling. “Smile” finished, then a cut from Hildur Guðnadóttir’s original Joker soundtrack played. But after that, I heard a song I definitely did not remember from the film. Unless “cash out” by an artist called savesomeone had dropped during my pee break at the movie theater, this Post Malone-sounding record was most certainly not on the Joker soundtrack. Looking at the playlist again, I found several other EDM and EDM-adjacent songs that definitely didn’t belong.
