DrumEatDrum
Platinum Member
A curious story I ran across
http://www.laweekly.com/2013-10-03/music/gaming-youtube-views/
A few excerpts:
Kind of makes me wonder about some people who have a millions views on their covers.
http://www.laweekly.com/2013-10-03/music/gaming-youtube-views/
A few excerpts:
Despite those millions of views, only 30 people bothered to show up.
Hypebot, another music website, found the discrepancy between the singer's online fan base and his real-life star power to be odd, suggesting the singer had committed one of the music industry's oldest forms of fraud: paying for his fans. "The possibility that BAKER bought social media support is worth further investigation," HypeBot's Clyde Smith wrote.
music industry insiders' inboxes are flooded with pitches from sites promising to help juke their stats.
Companies such as Vagex.com and Virool claim to offer customers "real YouTube views" for a small fee.
Joshua Smotherman, a PR consultant who founded the Middle Tennessee Music blog and admits to using exchange sites for his band, BUNKS, says: "Our album sales didn't increase, our downloads didn't increase, our mailing list sign-ups didn't increase, and that's really what we care about."
Indeed, inflated stats are so prevalent that music industry insiders say that millions of YouTube views don't mean all that much anymore. In fact, having an unreasonably large social media following could backfire.
In December, YouTube stripped Universal and Sony of a combined 2 billion views
The availability of cheap YouTube views means that even D.I.Y. artists can participate in payola.
Kind of makes me wonder about some people who have a millions views on their covers.