Atlantic Records has denied cooking the books for their artists, saying, “Atlantic Records has never used bots for any of our artists,” TMZ reports.
According to the report by TMZ, Atlantic Records is under fire on Twitter, with a ton of people reading into the engagement numbers for a bunch of its artists, specifically, on YouTube, where some feel like the data ratios for new projects just aren’t adding up (likes to views, etc.)
Don Toliver’s video for his song “Do It Right” which was posted just a few days ago, is the prime example being hoisted up on the bird app as supposed evidence of fakery that’s alleged to be afoot, most notably, in the comments, where many see telltale signs of phoney fans, TMZ reports.
TMZ reported that there are a lot of strangely written comments that have flooded this upload in the past 48 hours, with more and more pouring in with odd spelling, unconventional capitalization and grammatical errors. Others make no sense at all.
Plus, there are a lot of comments that have posted nothing but emojis, which are also seemingly jumbled together at random. When you click on some of these profiles, it looks like their accounts are relatively new and have only one comment for Don’s ‘DIR’ video.
Indeed it certainly comes across as bizarre, and some, including media personality DJ Akademiks have made outright allegations of this happening on a mass scale at Atlantic.
There are other Atlantic Records artists who have been lumped into this phenomenon, and none appear to have addressed it just yet, including Toliver. It’s worth noting while some point to the comments and seemingly lopsided engagement stats on their own as proof, there’s no real smoking gun that we can find. This mostly amounts to people speculating and theorizing, TMZ reports.
A representative for Toliver reportedly told TMZ that “Just like other artists and their teams who have been attacked with botting reports, we are both deeply upset and concerned. To be absolutely clear, neither Don or anyone on his team has had any involvement here.”
They add, “While we conduct our own investigation into the allegations, we urge Atlantic Records to do the same — to protect the integrity of not only their roster of artists but their reporting metrics. We look forward to sharing more as we obtain more information.”