There were two bits of music industry news last week that I’d like to connect, because I believe they point to widespread fraud.
The first is an amusing, hustler-games-the-system story from Rolling Stone. Stef Van Vugt, aka Steve Void, is a Dutch DJ and producer who runs a label called Strange Fruits – which is busting Spotify charts with 30-second snippets of rain. The idea of sleep-enhancing playlists isn’t his invention, nor is the idea of breaking up recordings into 30-second tracks in order to increase click counts (30 seconds is the minimum to register a paid stream). But Van Vugt has reached global top ten numbers on Spotify by spending, he says, “over eight figures” on marketing. This has earned his sounds of rain a Lady Gaga-scale streaming income, as Rolling Stone documents.
I wouldn’t take Van Vugt’s boast about his marketing budget at face value – there’s no way to know if he has literally paid tens of millions in his quest for Spotify riches. But his streaming numbers are v…
