Musicians are buying Facebook likes’ and YouTube viewers and Twitter follows to increase their popularity, according to a new report.
US based data monitoring company Next Big Sound claimed that it has a list of artists who they believe are buying statistics to increase their popularity with record labels and radio bosses.
The company say that 10,000 YouTube views can be bought for as little as £30 and there is also a market for buying comments. The information is to be released later this year in a report.
Next Big Sound gathers information on daily physical music and online consumption around the world.
Recently some unscrupulous social media users have even been buying comments to add a further layer of authenticity to their online presence, the report found.
Last year, after statistics from Pagedata said that spammers make up 8.7% of Facebook profiles, some of the social network’s most popular artist pages saw a sufficient drop in ‘Likes’.
Rihanna lost 28,275 Facebook likes while Lady Gaga, who boasts 53 million Facebook likes, lost 34,326.
Other popular artists to have lost out include Shakira, who had 26,406 fake Facebook Likes removed, Justin Bieber, who had 27,859 fake Facebook likes removed and Michael Jackson who lost 19,680.
Source: https://www.nextbigsound.com/