Suck proposed a variant on this, called
Crapster, that would need to be propageted by someone with
Record Company resources. In this case, the Record Company would hire a building floor full of people to do nothing but open free
Napster accounts all day, until about 1/3 the open accounts on Napster are actually being served by
stooges for, say,
Virgin Records. Each phony account contains desirably-titled songs, but all
mp3s downloaded from these accounts are actually recordings of
Achey Breaky Heart by
Billy Ray Cyrus.
An even more diabolical move for these companies could be to serve mp3 files that start off as advertised, but after about 15 seconds or so, launch into ABH, so that sullen teens would be forced to actually listen to each track they download, and get exposure to the song, to verify its authenticity. And to be even MORE diabolical, they could add some watermarking and extra bytes to the music to make sure that the size and checksum are the same as the real thing.