Game the system
Today’s expression is “game the system.” You remember the hit album called Sleepify? That’s the album full of completely silent songs that the band Vulfpeck created for its fans to stream in the middle of the night as they slept. What the band did is an example of gaming the system. The best way I can describe “game the system” is to say that it’s cheating without breaking the rules.
Remember that Spotify pays its artists according to the number of streams—there was no rule that the streams had to be real songs or even have any content whatsoever. The band took advantage of this and asked its fans to stream blank songs—and the band made money. They weren’t exactly breaking the rules, but they were getting an unfair advantage. They were gaming the system.
Here’s another example with Spotify. If you wrote and recorded a five minute song, you could actually break that song up into ten 30-second songs put together. That way, if anyone streamed the full five minutes song, you’d get credit for ten streams, since Spotify counts the first 30 seconds of any song as an official stream. If you did that, you would be gaming the system—getting credit for ten songs when only one is really being streamed. By the way, if any of you are able to game the system that way, I want a share of the money you make.
Here’s an example from sports. In many sports in North America, the teams with the worst records used to get the first choice of the best young new players the next year. That seems fair, right? If there’s a really good new player that’s almost ready to play professionally, he should go to the teams who need to improve the most. But over the years this led people to suspect that basketball teams were trying to game the system by losing on purpose—trying to get the worst record so as to get the best new player the next year.
In all these examples, there are rules design to protect a system like Spotify or sports leagues, but one party tries to get an advantage without technically breaking the rules.
That’s it for today, the Monday edition of Plain English. We’ll be back again on Thursday with a new episode. If you want to make sure you have all the latest episodes automatically on your phone, click “follow” if you listen on Spotify or “subscribe” if you listen on Apple Podcasts or another podcast app. And I’m on Facebook and Twitter under the user name PlainEnglishPod—don’t be shy about saying hi. See you Thursday
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