Spotify didn’t answer questions about what safeguards are in place, but its user agreement does prohibit “circumventing any territorial restrictions applied by Spotify or its licensors” (free accounts streaming from locations other than their original ones will be deactivated after two weeks), as well as “providing your password to any other person or using any other person’s username and password.” Doing so could lead to suspension or termination of the account.Īpple Music and representatives for BTS did not respond to multiple requests for comment, nor did the three biggest music labels and distributors in the world: Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, and Sony Music.īut experts say that unless there are truly effective safeguards in place, the ability to set up flash accounts to continually stream an artist’s music - and artificially boost its performance - exposes the Billboard system to fraud. One BTS fan group claimed it distributed more than 1,000 Spotify logins, all to make it appear as though more people in the US were streaming BTS’s music and nudge their album Love Yourself: Tear up the Spotify chart, which in turn factors into Billboard’s metrics.įans also deleted tweets about sharing Spotify accounts, and dozens sent direct messages defending themselves. “But if a superfan has decided to listen nonstop to a track, is that fake? If so, how many times do they have to listen to a track continuously before it is deemed ‘fake’?” “Superfans of pop acts have long been doing this sort of thing,” said Mark Mulligan, managing director of the digital media analysis company MIDIA Research. Some fans will even organize donation drives so other fans can pay for premium streaming accounts. The recipients then streamed BTS’s music continuously, often on multiple devices and sometimes with a virtual private network (VPN), which can fake, or “spoof,” locations by rerouting a user’s traffic through several different servers across the world. The strategy employed by the so-called BTS Army went largely like this: Fans in the US created accounts on music streaming services to play BTS’s music and distributed the account logins to fans in other countries via Twitter, email, or the instant messaging platform Slack. The Billboard charts have long been the gold standard by which musicians measure their success, but as recent tantrums by the likes of Nicki Minaj have highlighted, the rising influence of streaming services is upending that model - and giving die-hard fans a way to manipulate the data.Ī recent release by the Korean pop group BTS prompted its superfandom, millions strong across the globe, to do just that by launching a sophisticated campaign to make sure the boy band reached No.
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