The songs that the AI CEO provided to Smith originally had file names full of randomized numbers and letters such as “n_7a2b2d74-1621-4385-895d-b1e4af78d860.mp3,” the DOJ noted in its detailed press release.
When uploading them to streaming platforms, including Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music, the man would then change the songs’ names to words like “Zygotes,” “Zygotic,” and “Zyme Bedewing,” whatever that is.
The artist naming convention also followed a somewhat similar pattern, with names ranging from the normal-sounding “Calvin Mann” to head-scratchers like “Calorie Event,” “Calms Scorching,” and “Calypso Xored.”
To manufacture streams for these fake songs, Smith allegedly used bots that stream the songs billions of times without any real person listening. As with similar schemes, the bots’ meaningless streams were ultimately converted to royalty paychecks for the people behind them.
The “selling things online” idea had been tried repeatedly before Amazon, and always failed. What Bezos did was find a way to actually (eventually) make money at it. That was a business strategy tour de force that was quite impressively executed. That’s not to say that Bezos is a good employer or a nice person. But it’s often the case that it’s not the originality of the idea that matters, as much as how it’s executed.
I believe in a well-regulated market he wouldn’t have found success like he did. Running for 8 years off of parents and VC/stock influx of millions of dollars screams anti-competitive to me. At the very least if we had decent privacy protection laws then the early data harvesting and business application probably would’ve been looked into at the start and shutdown, or else the company broken up from a monopoly once it started strangling whole sectors.
Umm… eBay was around before amazon and was largely successful. So no, he isn’t a ground-breaker, nor am I suggesting eBay was either. And yeah you can talk about differences between their platforms but my point still stands.
All of these types “stand on the shoulders of giants” as they say. Except the giant is the taxpayer money that created the fertile ground that allowed their wealth in the first place. (E.g. the internet) And when they’re sufficiently successful, they love pulling up that ladder you and I and everyone else paid for.
Private profits, public losses. Same as it ever was.