The enshitification of YouTube's full album playlists
So a professional dominatrix specializing in foot worship signs into her YouTube account for the first time in seventeen years and compiles over 900 playlists, including the debut LP of progressive math-rock band 90 Day Men, an album from hyperpop/chiptune darling Saoirse Dream and portions of the original soundtrack from early 2000s anime Chobits . There's no punchline to that one. Let me explain.
Despite an entirely separate paid product — YouTube Music — vanilla YouTube's sometimes spotty enforcement of copyright has made it a goldmine for music, especially the kind that's niche, and possibly unavailable on legal streamers. Dedicated channels for screamo, doom metal or acid jazz, for instance, are regularly uploading rare releases, and searching for nearly any artist and "full album" will typically return the desired result no matter how obscure. In some cases, albums are uploaded as a single, lengthy video with timestamps indicating where one track ends and the next begins; in others, individual tracks are uploaded and compiled as playlists.
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In recent months, however, countless tainted playlists have cropped up in YouTube search results. Engadget compiled a sample of 100 channels (there are undoubtedly many, many more) engaged in what we'll refer to as playlist stuffing. These had between 30 and 1,987 playlists each — 58,191 in total. The overwhelming majority of these stuffed playlists contain an irrelevant, nearly hour-long video simply titled "More."
Engadget
The robotic narration of "More" begins: "Cryptocurrency investing, when approached with a long-term perspective, can be a powerful way to build wealth." You'd be forgiven for assuming its aim is to direct unwitting listeners to a shitcoin pump-and-dump. But over the next 57 minutes and 55 seconds, it meanders incoherently between a variety of topics like affiliate marketing, making a website and search engine optimization. ( Here's the entire transcript if you find yourself pathologically curious.) What's odd is there's no link to any scam page, no specific business the video directs a listener to patronize. Its description simply reads "Other stuff I've recorded and edited that I hadn't released until now, a special for my biggest fans with footage never seen before!"
For all its supposed advice on making easy money online, its best example isn't anything said in the video, it's that "More" has amassed nearly 7.5 million views at the time of this writing — and it's monetized.
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It's far from the only video of its kind. Many longer albums, like Mal Blum's You Look A Lot Like Me , Titus Andronicus's The Most Lamentable Tragedy and Slugdge's The Cosmic Cornucopia are appear as stuffed playlists with "More," " Unreleased " and " Full Album ." Both are similar marketing slop; they have 3.7 and 3.5 million views, respectively.
Unscrupulous artists also seem to engage, on a smaller scale, in a less obtuse sort of playlist stuffing. The channel Ultra Sounds has garnered 4.1 million views on its song "The Pause," after inserting it into — among other places — the Nine Inch Nails album Add Violence . Anastasia Coope's Darning Woman and 1991 , an album by shoegaze pioneers Drop Nineteens, are not made better for the inclusion of Murat Başkaya, an apparent Turkish rapper. Electronic dance group The Daring Ones have added a few hundred thousand views to several of their tracks by stuffing them into a variety of playlists, including one of last month's new Viagra Boys record . Engadget attempted to contact these musicians on their content strategy but has not heard back.
"More" takes advantage of a very simple UI quirk. Besides there being no easy way to tell how many playlists a YouTube account has made (it loads them 30 at a time on scroll), search results show only the first two tracks of a given playlist. "More" is almost invariably inserted as track three. Unwitting listeners who click and tab away are greeted with irrelevant marketing jargon around seven minutes later — a scenario reflected in the often bewildered comments beneath the video.
Playlist stuffing would seem to contravene YouTube's policies on playlists and deceptive practices , which proscribe "playlists with titles or descriptions that mislead viewers into thinking they're about to view videos different than what the playlist contains." A glance at the channel to which "More" was uploaded provides a hint that something more insidious is at play than just playlist stuffing for ad revenue.
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"More" is not the only video on the channel Hangmeas. The channel description states "I produce my own custom music videos with footage I record around East Asia where me and the locals sing and dance to traditional music from their cultures," and sure enough its other two uploads are songs from Cambodian musicians — uploaded 18 years ago. The army of channels posting stuffed playlists containing "More" are all similarly ancient. One, kcnmttcnn , was created on December 26, 2005, only a few months after YouTube itself first launched. It now hosts over 900 playlists. The vast majority of channels engaged in this activity were created in 2006, and the youngest was claimed in February of 2009. In all likelihood, these accounts were abandoned long ago and have since been compromised, either by whoever is behind "More" or by a third party which sold access to these accounts to them.
Just like Hangmeas, several of these possibly compromised accounts have their channel descriptions, links — like the Myspace account for the aforementioned dominatrix — and old uploads intact. Viewing them in aggregate triggers a strange kind of melancholy, like finding the photo album of someone else's family in a thrift store. Here's two friends go-karting down a stretch of farmland; here's a girl sledding down a very short hill ; here's 11 minutes off an online game of Uno ; here's two girls trying on hats in a department store; here's Muse playing "Time Is Running Out" in Paris, 2006, rendered in such poor quality it could be literally any show at all . This one's just called " David ." Its description reads "I'm cool."
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Unfortunately none of these channels had extant contact information. It's impossible to know how the subjects of these videos feel about their old digital selves being leveraged for playlist stuffing. We can't even know how many of these people are still alive.
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Somehow, a raft of accounts old enough to vote logged back in, probably from very different parts of the world than where they originated, and churned out playlists at a rate no human being could possibly hope to achieve. YouTube, it seems, did not find this suspicious. We reached out to YouTube for comment and did not receive comment by time of publication.
Yes, amateurish, nearly two decade-old footage harkens to a simpler time, when being able to upload a video that the whole world could see — though much more likely it would be viewed by a couple of your friends, and then one reporter 18 years later — was still exciting. But the history of the internet seems to be contained here: The simple joy of connection, neglected on a megacorp's servers, slowly co-opted by anyone trying to make a quick and dishonest buck.
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All of which seems to suit the 31-year-old pro golfer/social media star just fine. His first U.S. Open title came in 2020 at Winged Foot, the course best known for producing the 1974 'Massacre at Winged Foot' along with Phil Mickelson's meltdown in the trees and trash cans more than 30 years later. Then, last year, that bunker at Pinehurst. What would golf's everyman say to his millions of YouTube followers who someday might encounter their own version of the 50-yard bunker shot, widely recognized as one of the most difficult in the game, even under normal circumstances? 'The best piece of advice I give them is, just practice in weird, unique situations for maybe an hour a week, 20 minutes, whatever,' DeChambeau said. 'But try to be different and don't just hit the same stock shot every time.' A history-making shot in a tournament that does not produce them All the major championships have their own personalities. The Masters produces roars through the pines during back-nine charges on Sunday. The British Open is a brittle links-style test where players have to think differently about getting from Point A to Point B. America's golf championship has a reputation for forcing the best players to suffer like the rest of us. As a result, the list of 'greatest shots of all time' at the U.S. Open is a short one: — Ben Hogan's 1-iron on the 72nd hole that helped force a playoff at Merion in 1950. — Arnold Palmer's lash with driver to the first green at Cherry Hills in 1960. — Jack Nicklaus' 1-iron that hit the flagstick on No. 17 at Pebble Beach in 1972. — Tom Watson's chip from the rough on the same hole 10 years later to beat Nicklaus. — Tiger Woods' 12-foot putt at Torrey Pines in 2008 to force a playoff he eventually won over Rocco Mediate. And now, there is DeChambeau's bunker shot. 'When he took this big swing, the amount of confidence that you have to have to hit it that close to the golf ball and not accidentally catch too much ball and send it on top of the clubhouse, it's a very fine line," said NBC golf analyst Smylie Kaufman, whose biggest brush with pressure came when he played in the final group Sunday at the 2016 Masters. 'They work every single day, every week at these facets of the game in hopes they will have an opportunity to try it,' said Notah Begay, also of NBC. 'I think one of the most overlooked things about professional golf is all the calculation that happens on the fly in evaluating certain shots, which way the grass is lying, where the ball's going to land, and on top of all the normal things.' A tournament for everyone could come down to Bryson, Rory, Scottie Maybe the biggest irony is what the U.S. Open officially sells itself as, versus what always ends up happening. More than 10,000 players signed up to qualify for the U.S. Open which is, officially, open to any professional, or amateur with a handicap of 0.4 or lower. There will be good stories to tell among those who went through qualifying to make the 156-man field: a 17-year-old high schooler from Georgia, a dentist in Indiana who used to caddie at Oakmont. The cold facts: The last man to run the gauntlet of local and sectional qualifying to win the title was Orville Moody in 1969. (Lucas Glover went through sectional qualifying only when he won in 2009.) By the time the sun starts going down on Sunday, the tournament almost certainly will come down to a handful of players who virtually all golf fans have heard of. Though Scottie Scheffler is playing the best right now and Rory McIlroy recently won the Masters to complete the career Grand Slam, it's plausible to think that DeChambeau captures the attention of more of those fans than anyone. He recently surpassed 2 million subscribers on his YouTube channel. He is making golf feel like everyman's sport, posting videos in which he makes a hole-in-one with a wedge shot over his house, plays with off-the-rack clubs to see how they stack up and tries to beat a scratch golfer while playing left-handed. All of it sounds nutty, but it all goes back to that piece of advice he offered when asked how to replicate the improbable under impossible circumstances — i.e., a 50-yard bunker shot with the U.S. Open on the line. 'Once you get a stock shot down and you're comfortable with it, go have some fun,' DeChambeau said. 'Do a chipping contest with your amateur friends and throw it in the bunker from 50 yards, or throw it in a bush and see if you can get out. Stuff to that extent has suited my game very well.' ___ AP Sports Writer Ben Nuckols contributed to this report. ___ AP golf: recommended
