The Feed Is Fake That "viral" song, movie, meme, influencer, and celebrity drama was probably the product of a stealth marketing campaign.

What's clipping:

A record label — or a movie studio, celebrity talent agency, political campaign, or just some bozo with a video podcast — hires a company to turn a song, trailer, interview, stump speech, or whatever into short, social-media-friendly fragments, either by cutting the clips in-house or by farming them out to a network of freelance clippers. Those clips are then posted by normal-looking accounts: a meme page might serve up a quote about relationships with a new pop song playing behind it; a fan page for a horror movie might cut the scariest 20 seconds from the trailer into a loop and post it twice a day; another account might chop the most entertaining exchange from a three-hour podcast and rebroadcast it to people who would never sit through the entire episode. If enough of these clips rack up enough views fast enough, credulous social-media algorithms interpret the spike as an authentic surge of interest and push the videos to real users, who sometimes generate real engagement, prompting the algorithm to push those videos even further.

Until recently, an artist looking to juice his streaming numbers might have paid third-party services to send bots to Spotify. An executive at a Hollywood talent agency tells me that fake streams are a "loss leader" for the music industry, a fixed cost that produces a fixed number of fake-looking plays, "and that's never going to incite a wildfire moment." Clipping is different. It doesn't fake the stream itself; it fakes the appearance of excitement that causes real people to stream. "You might incept an actual trend — you have a chance for a 100-times return on your ad spend," the executive says.

Who could that be:

"We worked with a top-five celebrity I can't name. We got 40 million views for an artist with just a hundred thousand followers."

Bieber's Coachella put into a question:

And then there was Justin Bieber. In April, Bieber — who is among the most-streamed artists in pop history and has 287 million Instagram followers — headlined two consecutive weekends at Coachella, playing before massive festival crowds and millions more watching on YouTube. Coachella is the biggest stage in pop music save only for the Super Bowl, the kind of event that in theory generates its own attention. And yet on both weekends, a Discord server I'd been monitoring hosted paid campaigns for Bieber's Coachella performances, offering clippers as much as a dollar per thousand views. The announcement for one campaign read, in all caps, "THIS IS SO VIRAL GO GO GO GO." (Bieber was also listed as a client on Chaotic Good Projects' website before his name, along with the rest of the company's roster, was deleted.)

Whole article: https://archive.ph/xSpnF#selection-2003.351-2003.956

It's undeniable that the amount of undisclosed ads running on tiktok is just crazy and the moment you realize this is like waking up from matrix.

On another note, it's interesting how much live streaming culture from covid period had shaped the mainstream. From parasocial intensity to clips astroturfing.

If something is free, your attention is the product being sold. This doesn't just apply online.

Edited May 16May 16 by Sheep

I mean, I noticed that this was happening, but if the song is good, people will stream it. This is just a form of exposure, even if created by fake/botted means.

It's a form of marketing. Mostly everybody is doing it. I see ads on TikTok all the time from "fanpage" accounts

However, it's not illegal and does not translate to inflated streams like bots

I wonder how much Taylor benefited from this. She had an insane push during the pandemic that resulted in renewed interest (which isn't fake), but she definitely had an inorganic push on all social media apps.

Obviously. Everytime a new song by an A-lister comes out a lot of pages with a lot followers use the song and it's not out of genuine interest and awareness. They're being paid. That being said it's better than fake streams and in the end if people don't vibe with the "clip" it still won't happen.

4 minutes ago, OrgVisual said:

However, it's not illegal and does not translate to inflated streams like bots

its literally illegal to run undisclosed ads

I've been saying this for ages

the entertainment industry in general is very inorganic which is why "industry plant" has always been such a funny/inconsequential term imo (and prob why a lot of ppl never seemed to grasp what it was referring to )

2 hours ago, RideOrDie said:

Not a huge shock to see Katy Perry there with the recent Spotify streaming push some of her songs have been getting.

But there really isn't much difference between Katy and her 29% fake followers and the ones with 25% or 26%. It makes wonder how big the list would be if they showed everyone with more than 20.0% fake followers.

this is how Mckenna Grace got famous overnight. clipping

do you think this is the way forward and is why we are seeing this kind of success?

I believe it happens but the quality and nostalgia factor of TOTGA and Beauty and a Beat is what makes it stick, it's just initially pushed. Especially when you see new music bombing hard

Are you still conspiring about this

It gets to a point…

A tweet with 3 likes that doesnt actually prove anything is not noteworthy enough to thread sis.

Edited May 17May 17 by KatyPrismSpirit

This again?

so they are good at marketing

what else is new

Girl move on

I'm confused at the point you're trying to make here. Is it that short clips are being used for marketing purposes? Because we already knew that

Add Nicki to title for hit thread x