00:00 A writer investigates the world of people trying to game Spotify and trick others into listening to their music.

04:29 Spammers are infiltrating different parts of the Spotify ecosystem, such as playlists and the Release Radar, by uploading songs and claiming bigger artists are featured, and even spamming the white noise genre by uploading the same audio multiple times with different names, leading to an industry-wide issue that Spotify is aware of but struggles to fully stop.

08:16 A listener named Katie discovers that her second most listened-to artist on Spotify Wrapped is an artist called Drum Coon, whom she has never heard of before.

12:14 Drum Coon is an artist who creates fake songs designed to trick smart speakers like Alexa and Google Home, and he has a large collection of different types of these songs as well as other music in various genres.

16:33 Drum Coon, the mysterious artist who appeared in Katie's Spotify app, reached out to the host and agreed to do an interview, starting with a disclaimer.

20:49 Tendai, the artist behind Drum Coon, started sharing his music with the world after moving to rural Denmark and feeling isolated.

24:21 Tendai, frustrated by the lack of success on Spotify, questions why his music isn't featured on official playlists like Serenity and wonders how other musicians get to the top, comparing it to climbing a mountain with a pulley system that doesn't seem designed to help artists like him, leading him to start his Hey Alexa spam operation.

28:43 Tendai's music played on Kelly's Spotify account for three straight days without her noticing, and it turns out that it was likely due to Katie's former roommate, Gabby, asking her Google home to play music and Katie's Google home picking it up on low volume and playing it continuously.

32:48 The song "Hey Google plays some music" was taken off of Spotify before Spotify Wrapped came out last year, likely because Spotify or the distributor didn't like the fact that the artist, drumcoon, was doing his whole smart speaker thing, so it didn't show up on Katie's Spotify Wrapped and they didn't see it.