 Hey everybody what's going on it's your man Kory, welcome to the Digital Dash where I will be giving you guys tips on how to market your sons and get those numbers. Boom it. Now if you're new to the channel and you don't know who I am, first off welcome. But I'm a digital marketer, I specialize in helping artists like yourself get their sons heard through platforms like Spotify, like Instagram, like YouTube and a bunch of others. Now what I want to do today guys is going to be a little bit different. I don't have a real lesson to teach, but I do have a story of how a close friend of mine almost lost $30,000 due to, for lack of better words, this fugezi ass playlist company. Now before we get into all of that make sure you come and follow me on Instagram, I make sure to put my app name somewhere on the screen. Come talk to me, come engage with me, come give me some video ideas, all of that. Now with that being said let's get right into it. So like I was saying this close friend of mine, this mentor of mine, someone that I've been working with for the past couple of years of my career. He recently got caught up in a situation where he worked with this fraudulent playlist company and they almost got him to lose $30,000. So for the sake of this story, we're just going to call this friend Zach, right? So Zach is a producer, so what he'll do is he'll go out, he'll buy features from bigger artists, put them over his beach, you know, buy the exclusive rights to the songs and then he'll then go out and market those songs as if they were his own. You know, pretty much taking the Metro boom and Mike will made it out for his own production. So as a part of his game plan, he decided to work with his playlisting company and they're a pretty popular playlisting company. I've seen Facebook ads for them. I've seen people reviewing them on the internet. I've seen people talking about them. So they're definitely somebody that's out there, but pretty much he decided to work with his playlisting company about five or six months ago give or take to top of his campaign to get a little bit more streams on his Spotify profile to bring some more presence to it. So fast forward about three or four months after that, he gets an email from this show kid. He's like, Hey, we have flagged the account. We've held your money because we have detected fraudulent streams on your account because of this. We can't give you a payout of $30,000. Now off top, Zach is mad because, you know, I'm pretty sure he would have been mad if it was $50 or if it was $100, but $30,000. That's a different level of anger right there. But Zach, he's confused. He doesn't know what's going on. He's hitting up this show kid. Like, I don't know why we would be detected for fraudulent streams. I don't know what's going on. How can we figure this out? So pretty much he and this show kid start to look into it together. This show kid reveals that the fraudulent stream started kicking in around five or six months ago. Around the same time that Zach started using that popular playlist streaming company, they're looking to it and they determined that the company has been using bot playlists. And if you haven't seen my video about bot playlists, they're pretty much these robotic playlists that are made by people who just program a bunch of computers to go through playlists like listeners. They're pretty much used by people to drive or streams to game the Spotify algorithm or to pretty much gain Spotify out of money entirely. And they don't like this. Spotify hates this. If they catch you, they will try to make an example of you. And it's exactly what they were trying to do for my friend Zach. They were trying to make an example out of him, hold up his money and pretty much send a message out to other people of stop using these bot playlists to naturally Zach is mad. He hits up the playlist streaming company. He asked him all his questions. They deny it. But the evidence pretty much pointed to that it has to be you guys. It has to be you guys pushing all of these bot playlists onto our music. Now, luckily for Zach, this show kid didn't take down his account because I have heard some horror stories. I have seen real results get knocked off by one bad playlist to one fake playlist and it just completely ruins the entire operation. But he was able to pretty much let them know that he didn't know. And they gave him a pass for it. So I definitely learned a few things from this situation. Right. One is that people will scam you over anything. Like there are literally people in the industry who will scam you over any and everything. But I don't want you guys to let it discourage you from working with people and getting outside help. I just want you to be a little bit more diligent in asking questions and making sure that you're not working with someone or something who is trying to take advantage of you. Another thing that I learned is that it's probably a bad idea to work with a faceless company, right? Like this company that Zach was working with while they were a pretty well known and pretty reputable company. I don't think that during the duration of his campaign, he ever talked to a real person. Like there was no one guiding him through the process. There was no one letting him know like what was up with the playlist. He was pretty much just, you know, paying his money, being placed and then never hearing from these people again. And in my opinion, that's pretty much a red flag when you can't even get somebody on the phone or on the email to talk to you about what's going on in your campaign and where these results are pretty much coming from. And thirdly, this is an epidemic that's probably not going to stop anytime soon. Like I said, this was a reputable company putting people into these bot playlists. I'm sure there are others out there who are doing the same thing. And until Spotify comes up with a real way that we can tell, you can't really tell if you're in a bot playlist until it's too late. I have a video about that. I'll make sure to link it in the description below so you can learn a little bit more about it. But pretty much when you're pitching yourself to these playlists, just be diligent and watching your analytics. If you see anything sketchy, stop it while it's still happening before it goes too far and you know, takes it to a place where you can't pretty much reverse the results. Now as always guys, if you feel like you learned anything today, please like and share this video. Hit those post notifications as well as I wouldn't want you guys to miss anything. Once again, my name is Kory and I'll see y'all next time.