Here are a couple of things which have cropped up in my world this week which show that faking it in your music marketing isn’t such a good idea.

A short while ago, a band local to myself with a mere 747 monthly Spotify listeners announced they had achieved a million streams for one of their songs. With such a small fan base, fake streams have obviously been brought into play here. Unfortunately, the song they chose to artificially inflate is now the most 6th popular song on Spotify so anyone accessing their Spotify page on the mobile app will never get to see this play count.  A waste of their time and money!

In my day job working for an event promotions company this week I received a DM from a young singer asking for support slots at shows.  The singer claimed an 100,000 plus Instagram following, an impressive number for someone just starting out.

Taking a peek round the Insta page, I noticed that there were only seven posts from this person.  How can anyone amass 100,000 followers from just 7 posts? That’s right, the followers were primarily bots and fake accounts. I had to explain that promoters wouldn’t take kindly to being told that an artist has a massive online following which turned out to be nothing but fakery. It’s Threatin all over again!

In summary, buying fake likes, follows, streams, views is never worth it.  If it’s done trying to impress people in the industry to get ahead, forget it, those people are one step ahead of YOU. You’re just showing yourself to be naive or even worse, duplicitous.

Got any questions about this post or how you can better market yourself?

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