While artificially inflating view counts can work for a time, the industry soon catches on and either begins to ignore a certain metric altogether, or find a way to disable it.
That's what happened with an app called Eternify, which allowed an artist to stream endless loops of a song for 30 seconds on Spotify in order to increase the stream counts. However, the company announced that it put a stop to the app's API (application program interface) so that it can no longer game the system.
The app was created by a New York-based ambient act Ohm & Sport, who might have continued to use it for their own music without much notice had they not released the app to the world.
Of course, you don't have to create an app to do something similar, as an artist can just put his album on repeat on Spotify for 24 hours with no app required. That works, at least for now, but you can bet that the streaming service will be keeping a close eye out for anything that tries to game the system in the future.
