If anyone has checked our Spotify page over the past few days, they would have noticed that “Waiting and Hoping and Knowing” has received almost 3,000 plays and we are suddenly up to over 1,000 monthly listeners. No one panic. We have held off on buying our Ferraris. I will eat my bass if these are actual listeners streaming our music. More than likely, through no evil machinations of our own, these are fake, boosted plays by bots. I've included the graph for our listens on Spotify For Artists for “Waiting and Hoping and Knowing”:
We certainly appreciate when graph go up, but the sharp drop offs here are not normal for streams. It makes no sense for the song to get 1,000 plays on Thursday but then zero on Friday followed by two days of 800 streams with none again yesterday. Far more likely would be a gradual increase in plays or at least a consistent number of streams if this was on an actual playlist. It is also hard to believe that we have 2,794 plays off only 1,305 listeners, as shown by the numbers below, also from Spotify For Artists:
It is flattering, don't get me wrong, but I doubt that everyone who listened averaged two plays in the span of five days. Best I can tell, we got added to a playlist with 40,000 saves with this dubious Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pr_soundz. I do not know how they found our music, but probably this is a ploy at payola by the playlister where we see the streams, find the playlist, and then pay them for more plays. We have yet to be contacted by anybody regarding payment, but, of course, we are not interested. We've been the victim of a bot attack before - “Blood on my Sandals” suddenly spiked last December, but a few days later, we got a note from Spotify that they had detected botted plays, and the numbers dropped off overnight. If we keep getting flagged for botted plays, there is a chance our music gets pulled by our distributor. That's literally the opposite of what we want. The best steps here seem to be to notify Spotify and our distributor, Distrokid, that we had nothing to do with this, and hopefully everything will return to normal soon. I mean, do listen to “Waiting and Hoping and Knowing” because it's a good song, but please do not use bots.
Bots or no bots, we will be playing on the patio at Madlife on May 16th, and we are very excited for the opportunity. We have a longer set so expect more improv, but also expect sunshine so bring sunscreen. We hope to see y'all there.
Haven't the Braves really turned it around?
Tyler