We’ve never been a proponent of buying fans – paying for Likes, Followers, Youtube views etc seems like an underhanded way of bringing a band or artist’s numbers up. Many do it though – for a variety of reasons ranging from bad advice from mgmt and not knowing any better, to trying to project an image that isn’t really there – faking it.
Well, some of the Major record labels have been caught doing just that. Universal Music Group, Sony /BMG, RCA and more have been stripped of millions of views on various artist Youtube accounts (with Universal being hit the hardest losing more than 2 billion hits), due to a breach in Youtube’s Terms of Service – they’ve been caught using companies that for a fee, inflate views artificially with bots or hacking. Buying views.
First broken by Daily.Dot (you can read the details there), and quickly spread by many other music and news sites, the implications are many. For us… its this thought:
How many of us like the music we listen to, because we do like it? Or do we like it because we are conditioned to like it, through inflated numbers – if a million people have watched this video and like it… then we better like it too, even if deep down, we really don’t. Peer pressure. Bowing to the will of the masses but in this case, the masses are phantoms put there by the labels to sell a product in any way they can.
Faking it is always going to be part of marketing any product.. but now it seems, for a time at least, the big guns are on a level playing field and are going to have to earn those views… from us!
Nice post.