Talk about the music biz - marketing, promotions, contract law, copyright etc...
User avatar
By JamesJeffery Mon May 04, 2015 8:37 pm
Hey guys,

As many on here know I'm a programmer, and marketer, and having used Soundcloud for some years I recently started to see if I can legally exploit it via "loopholes".

After much testing I found something. I was able to use this loophole to generate traffic. If you don't believe me, create a http://bit.ly link that links to your track on Soundcloud, and watch me send traffic to it. I will only do this for a select few people just to prove I can do it.

I used this to try to sell a product through Soundcloud related to music producers. Here's a quick screenshot:

Note that the figures are clicks, not money. I've cut the money bit out lol

Image

It's important to note that I haven't unleashed my software to its full capabilities. I'm still working on it. This isn't no stupid follow me and I follow you back thing. The way I reach out to audiences is invisible to the world. My methods are strategic, and I put solid effort into discovering the very loopholes people think are impossible.

I'm planning to test it out on my own Soundcloud account in the next few days, so if anyone is interested to learn how it goes, and to see if I can actually break into a scene by combining programming skills, marketing skills and my *cough* *cough* skills (I'll leave that open to interpretation).

There's a few talented artists here that deserve some recognition. I'd like to bring some of those in. Push the good music out there.

I've not posted this anywhere else, I wanted to bring this to the attention of the community I enjoy the most.

Anyone who's producing decent music, and wants to jump onboard this, fire me a PM. I'm not always online so if theres a delay in responding, forgive me.

Peace
User avatar
By Wal Martian Tue May 12, 2015 6:59 pm
JamesJeffery wrote:
Wal Martian wrote:Thanks, looking forward to see how this pans out.


I see it worked nicely. I only ran a simple test on yours.

Wow this is sick, whatever you did it drew 240+ plays in the last day. I find all this really interesting, thanks for the test run :worthy:
User avatar
By JamesJeffery Thu May 14, 2015 6:42 pm
Soundcloud patched it because I got greedy and stuck out like a soar thumb. It works, but now requires manual interaction. I will release it over the coming days, I need to clean it up a bit (I'm a bit anal, my code has to be nice before I let people see it) Was developed in Python, so you will need Python 2.7 installed. I'll release install instructions too. In fact, I might just put it on GitHub.
User avatar
By medearis Thu May 14, 2015 6:50 pm
I get advertising and PR but this seems like a trick/cheat-code if you have to have some programming background to achieve something like 200+ plays/day... kinda puts up a red flag in my mind. I am probably just misunderstanding what exactly you're doing but it just seems like some binary spell casting to me yet.
User avatar
By JamesJeffery Thu May 14, 2015 7:19 pm
medearis wrote:I get advertising and PR but this seems like a trick/cheat-code if you have to have some programming background to achieve something like 200+ plays/day... kinda puts up a red flag in my mind. I am probably just misunderstanding what exactly you're doing but it just seems like some binary spell casting to me yet.


Hey Medearis,

It wasn't tricking plays. The interaction received is from real people. Comments are real. Followers are real. It's pushing your music into the hands of those who would potentially like this sort of music.

I'll explain what it does. It'll be public soon anyway. Basically, it goes around Soundcloud and does some PR/Marketing for you.

Many people pass around their music on Soundcloud. Leaving comments on other peoples tracks asking them to "kindly" check out Joe Bloggs new track. This does the same. Except automatically.

My software goes to soundcloud and gets all the tracks in every popular genre uploaded within the last hour. It will then proceed to comment on the tracks with something like:

"Tight, I like this track. I was just listening to @base2's music before coming to this, and the combination is like music to my ears. I've followed you. Look forward to your next upload."

I will have hundreds of these pretend comments in a file. My software picks one at random. This is to avoid SoundCloud banning you for making too many comments with the same text.

The software will also like the persons tracks, repost it, and follow them. So when this person sees their notifications, and see the comment, they won't think "This is spam".

The clever part about the software is it can leave all these comments from fake accounts. So nothing is linked to the account that the software is promoting. Soundcloud limit you to 30 comments within a set period. I got around this by creating 1000's of accounts. The accounts created looked absolutely real. The software generated a complete random profile for this fictitious user.

So, if I wanted to comment on 5000 tracks, the software works out that it needs 5000 divided by 20 accounts. It then creates all those counts very quickly (in a mater of seconds), then drops the comments on 5000 tracks (also takes seconds).

I was able to do this because I found a loophole in Soundclouds registration system that allowed me to bypass the Human Verification. Because of that loophole I was able to craft the method above to absolutely rape Soundcloud overnight. I must have left millions of comments. I was promoting all my friends accounts, and getting paid for doing some.

Because of that, they spotted the loophole in the registration and fixed it. Now when you create an account you have to enter a captcha code to prove you're human.

I patched the software this morning to reflect the changes. It still works, except you have to sit there for ages entering captcha code after captcha code as it's creating the accounts.

And that's the meat and potatoes of it.