Just when you thought the NY Times’ reputation couldn’t get any worse this year …

Back during the Napster days, Howard Stern had the Foo Fighters on. He asked them what their thought of the whole Napster vs. Metallica legal debate.

Dave Grohl told him he was 100 percent for Napster, explaining that they barely made a dime from record sales, and instead made the bulk of their money from touring and t-shirt sales. And that very few musicians were in the same boat as Metallica, actually making money from their album sales.

So from that point of view, the more people who were exposed to their music meant the more folks who might want to go see them in concert.

I enjoy that they’re focusing on ‘promoting pirated software and game cheats’ before talking about malware first.

Cybersecurity ethusiast Karol Paciorek who spotted the playlist said, “cybercriminals exploit Spotify for malware distribution. Why? Spotify has a strong reputation and its pages are easily indexed by search engines, making it an effective platform to promote malicious links.”

That’s a very different, more helpful story. “Watch out, Spotify links are being used to distribute malware to your computer.”

When abusing platforms, spammers and scammers leave no stone unturned to promote their agenda.

Money. They aren’t doing this as part of a ‘peons of the world unite to steal software’ scheme. They’re doing it to generate traffic so they make more ad revenue.