I was reading about websites that sell fake music streams, entire operations built to manipulate play counts through bots and streaming farms. Apparently, several were taken offline after a legal complaint exposed how they were distorting the data, diverting royalties away from real artists. Spotify, the article said, has penalties for this kind of fraud, financial consequences not just for the scammers, but for the distributors whose tracks show signs of artificial boosting. It’s supposed to keep the ecosystem honest, or at least less rigged, in a system increasingly easy to game. What struck me most was the ingenuity of the con, the same old tune of theft. It’s like watching someone learn to improvise in reverse: not to express, but to exploit. They study the soft spots in the system like a jazz musician finds the blue notes, except here, the notes they choose aren’t meant to move anyone. Just to take.