 Alright so really quickly I want to say that this channel is going through a lot of changes and this video is one of the first of many of a series where I'm talking about the music industry and having practical advice for artists every single Monday. So when you're looking for that, just tune in. Every Monday. Let's get it. Baw, what's up everybody once again it's Bram and Shawn and this video is brought to you by bramandnetwork.com because I signed myself. Now I gotta talk about something as wild. This might be mind blowing to a lot of y'all artists because I know y'all are looking out to be scammed, right? But you know sometimes when it comes to being kind, the kind is so close to you you don't even realize it's happening and in this particular case it's the fact that there are instances where artists are actually scamming other artists. And I don't even necessarily mean intentionally. You might be an artist right now that has been used to scam another artist and not even know it. What am I talking about? I'm going to explain really soon and I'm going to mention the company but first let's look at it this way. Alright, you might remember the video that I did about a week or two ago but I was talking about the fact that there's $1.5 billion projected to be lost in one year and just because people are paying influencers who have a perceived following and influence but they actually have fake influencers. They actually have fake bots and things like that. And then I even broke down and got more specific to music how there's $300 million that is being lost in the streaming space just because people are getting con in one way or another, right? So many artists are familiar with the ways of getting con like yo, you paid a playlister to get streams and they really don't really have a true playlist, right? There's fake listeners, fake followers on their playlists. People are, they're familiar with the pump and dump strategy, right? Where people are paying for streams and you see this huge influx of streams and the next thing you know, bam, like a week after your pro campaign, there's nothing else. One thing I slightly touched on in that video is the fact that there are people being scammed with real listeners. How is that happening, right? You're getting real listeners, you pay and you get real listeners but at the same time you're being scammed and you don't get the following you expect from these real listeners. Now outside of the song being trashed because a real listener has heard it and they don't like it, there's actually situations where it could be a great song, real listeners and I'll get into that and you don't actually get the result that you want to. And a lot of times this is artists that are these real and kind of fake listeners at the same time. Let me explain. But really sparked this video and hold me in an artist that I know who he's really dope by the way, but he hit me up saying that, yo, I saw that video on the fake followings and all that kind of stuff and how much money is being lost. And it's crazy you say that a situation that happened to me with a company was I reached out because I wanted to get on the playlist, right? And I'm paying for the services and in paying for those services, they say, okay, cool, we're going to do this, you give us the money, but to make this situation happen, we need your account information, the basic account information, right? And it might be more sensitive than what you want to give off, but it's not too far off base because they're asking for your Spotify account information. They want to get you Spotify views and listens, right? Now, with that being said, as a matter of fact, I'll just resort back to the initial message. All right. So he said one of the requirements was to have access to your Spotify account and when he went back into his account, he saw that they auto-fought like 12 different playlists, 12 different playlists. And when he checks these playlists, he sees that these playlists have like 500k followers, a lot of followers, right? And when you think about it, if I'm a playlist service, right? And I'm getting all of these artists to actually buy my service and in getting their service, I'm getting access to their account. And now I can make these artists' accounts start to stream the music that these other artists are asking me to get listened to. Now I'm using artists to listen to other artists' music, but it's not even the actual artists that are listening to it, it's their accounts. And I'm getting my playlist following to look bigger than it was before, right? This is a huge thing that's happening that a lot of people are missing. And really quickly, because I got a crazy other story to tell you all when it comes to like Scam Central, it's actually kind of dope. I'm not going to even lie, but I want to make sure I remember to say the name of that company. And it was Pop Filter. That was the name of the company that took his account, right? And then they auto followed. That was what he was using, because in your world, as long as you get the streams, you might just be looking to get the look at the moment. It might not be a bad thing for you and you might want to go to them because you can see they're probably good at that. But at the end of the day, just realize what's happening and understand the account information that you are giving up, that sensitive information is not necessarily outside of bounds for any marketing situation that you're working with to have access to certain accounts. But you do want to make sure that they're not doing stuff that you didn't request because auto following other accounts is definitely not a part of that process. Now, if you say, I will do it, I will auto follow these accounts for you to do this service, then that's a whole other thing. But keep that in mind and understand that this isn't even a small thing. And before I get into this story, once again, I got to say this from this perspective because it's realer than y'all know. As a matter of fact, let me get to screen share Shyamote. What you have to understand is that there are a lot of celebrities, big names, artists, actors, all those type of people who have fake streams. Some of them got got it, right? Some of them are getting, you know, done over just like a lot of smaller artists are and they don't realize that they have fake followers. But there's plenty of them that know, or at least their agencies or teams are aware that there's a large portion of fake followers in there doing it for all other types of reasons that I'm not going to get into right now. But we can even say if you know that you have a good amount of real followers and real impact in the world and you have all this business and big deals to justify that, then just boosting your following can give you some other incentives deal-wise as well. And it's not completely fake, so it's not like you're going to look like you were lying in some cases. I'm not going to even get into all that, right? To make it clear, think about the fact that J. Cole had the line in the 21 Savage song that went like this. Question, how many fake in they streams getting they plays from machines? I can see behind the smoking members, niggas ain't really big as they seem. Now I want you to think about that line. J. Cole, you know, he is down to earth, right? He's not the most out of touch individual in the world, but at his level, be clear that he's not thinking about the small indie artists who has fake streams that nobody knows about or he just isn't on his radar yet, right? He is referring to people that you probably wouldn't even believe have fake streams, fake followers. Having these machines make them look bigger and better than they are. That's why there's been legitimate instances where major celebrities have lost millions of followers overnight just because Instagram might do a system update cleanup where they get rid of a lot of bots and now all of a sudden you see a lot of these bots which were their followers disappear. You might go from 10 million followers to 2 million followers overnight, right? It's a very real thing. But last and certainly not least, I have to speak on this playlist scam that was actually Ingenious Man. I mean, Ingenious Man is not something that you guys have to look out for. I don't even think it's going on anymore, but it wasn't even really a threat to artists directly in this way. So what was happening was people in the industry, right? People who pay attention to playlists were actually noticing that there was some big playlists getting mentioned on the top playlist on Spotify, right? And you're like, yo, who are these random playlists? I have no idea where they're coming from. And what they noticed was there was a lot of songs on these playlists that were like 30 seconds long. And the most interesting thing about it was they only had about 1,200 monthly listeners. They didn't have even a lot of followers, none of that stuff at all, right? You have 1,200 monthly listeners. That means unique individuals. So what that means to be a top playlist performing those 1,200 monthly listeners need to be listening a lot of times, right? If you only have that many people in that many plays. So the kind of cool, interesting dope part about this scam is the fact that it was estimated that there was 1,200 fake premium accounts which cost them roughly $12,000. They bought real premium accounts. They were listening to 30 seconds of each track because that's how much it costs to be monetized, right? And they had this soulful music playlist on a loop all day every day and would end up earning $415,000 a month in revenue. And the crazy part is people don't even know how long it was going on before it got caught. But it was only $12,000 to set this up, right? 1,200 fake premium accounts to make $415,000 a month. And the even wilder part is at this particular time because this was back in 2018, I don't know if Spotify changed this yet but the wildest part about it is they were technically not doing anything illegal since they purchased real accounts, real Spotify accounts. They spent $12,000 and they had their accounts though controlled by bots listening to the music on these playlists again and again. It was a loophole in Spotify at the time. I'm not sure what the current rules allow or how they might have fixed the situation like that because obviously I can't imagine them allowing that to run. But that's how complex and intricate these scams can get, right? You literally have one person spending $12,000 listening to all their own music to make that much money back in a short period of time and not even able to get caught. People are thinking through these online scams and honestly, right? Some of them don't involve artists but a lot of them do screw artists over like the one we mentioned earlier in here. So watch out for things like that. Be clear that your account information is sensitive information and in a lot of cases you might need to get something signed if you want somebody to have access to your account so they can perform a particular service. And the thing is, right? For a lot of these services, the most dangerous thing or at least the things you should be the most cautious about are likely going to be those instances where you don't even see the people. You're doing email exchanges. You have no idea how these people look. You have no idea what their real name is. That's a completely different situation. So people complain enough about particular people who have services out there and call them scams and they know who their face is, right? There's a buttload of influencers online or people who are giving marketing advice and all that kind of stuff. But at very least, you know what these people's faces. You know what they look like. You know what they sound like, right? And they, a lot of times travel and show where they are. That's less likely. I'm not saying these people aren't going to scam, right? There are some people who do that, but that's far less likely to worry about. Like people try to say stuff like that to me before. And I'm thinking like, look, the reality in this day and age, right? You can scam far easier with far less risk without having to show your face, right? It's no point of putting your face out there heavily if your plan is to scam people because there's a way smarter way to go about that. So keep that in mind. Anytime you are dealing with these people that are just email exchange, you're just random companies, their risk is very low to scam you. It doesn't mean they would scam you or they're planning to, but the risk that they're taking might scam you is far lower than somebody whose face is already out there and they're openly promoting a brand, trying to build a brand and a service that can be damaged by scamming people and can likely put them in jail with ease. So that's it for this video today. This video is brought to you by brandmannetword.com. We help build artists' brands, develop their infrastructure so they can take control of their operation and build their own fan base, an operation custom to them. If you like this video, go ahead and like, but if you like it, you might as well share it and if you are not subscribed, you know what to do, hit that subscribe button.