After the Wedding rapper Massiv recently admitted in a live stream that he had already bought clicks, the German rap scene is currently discussing the topic intensively. Now Fler in one of his live streams spoke up and confirmed that his streaming numbers were also manipulated.
Fler: “The external perception of rappers is distorted by fake streams”
Among other things, Massiv had claimed that almost every major rapper would buy clicks on his songs. Fler agrees with this statement and admits that his streaming numbers were also artificially inflated. However, the rapper claimed he didn’t spend any money on it. Rather, an anonymous “hacker” would have contacted him and offered to get him additional streams free of charge: “Then I’m the biggest ass if I don’t say bro what I don’t know doesn’t bother me. What Universal doesn’t know doesn’t hurt them.”
In the stream, Fler complained that the external perception of artists would be distorted by the streams purchased. All of a sudden, completely insignificant rappers without a large fan base would be noticed by the media and become relevant in the perception of outsiders. Big labels would play the game because they can earn good money with these artists in the medium term and therefore have no desire to “be the spoilsport”.
Who is responsible?
According to Fler, the major labels have experts who can use various tools to pull very detailed statistics from the Spotify data, so that purchased streams, if they were not “delivered” professionally, would quickly be discarded. Massiv also had to learn that, and got into serious trouble with Universal after the clicks he had bought. Fler sees Spotify as primarily responsible for putting an end to the streaming fake. The rapper finds it cheeky that the streaming platforms are currently handing over responsibility to the labels and artists:
“I would say to Spotify: How can it be that you offer a service that is not bombproof from manipulation? And how did you come up with the idea of contacting the label or the distribution and pointing it out to them? How dare you accuse the artist of something where you MUST assume from the outset that it can come from anywhere because your platform is not secure?”
Watch a recording of the live stream here: