BTS’ Butter Bombing? A Billboard Accounting Fraud. i.

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READING: 10 minutes

Introduction 

As previously reported, ‘Levitating’ by Dua Lipa (ft. DaBaby) underwent a major investigation by MRC data and Billboard for fraudulent activity denying it the Hot 100 number one spot. It was discovered this was due to a small bulk purchase of digital sales coming from an overseas VPN. Thus sales not arriving under American turf. Well BTS have been consistently doing the EXACT same thing since debuting number one but have organised an act of pseudo-terrorism against the music industry, with their own weapon: Butter. It’s number 2, ‘Good 4 U’ has more prominence across the States with major streaming and radio presence, and satisfactory sales. So how have Butter been able to get away with the phenomenon? And are they really number one? In Part 1 [below] I will compare Butter against peers who hold the same title to demonstrate how it always remains an outlier (not in a good way), and in Part 2 I will explain the methods of how the BTS Army have been able to construct such a plan. 

Looking back Short Term 

Figure 1.

Figure 1 is a line bar showing the metrics of every number one single over the past year, and is supposed to compare Butter against all other Hot 100 number one songs, as the Hot 100 formula has remained relatively unchanged for some time. At first, it appears that when a debut number one single makes an appearance, it is attributed to an exceptional streaming performance, with such examples including ‘WAP’ (93 million streams) and ‘Driver’s License’ (76.1 million streams). Seeing as Billboard provides most points of its formula towards streaming as this is the dominant form of music consumption, it is not surprising these streams would lead these songs to reach the top spot. The level of streaming for number ones dwindled around Q4 2020 (averaging 22 million streams) before recovering in Q1 and Q2 2021 (averaging 34 million streams) with several spikes occurring due to several debut number ones. The tail end includes Butter, however, as its weeks have continued atop the Hot 100 its streaming numbers have produced the worst results annually. This is concerning because history has shown as time goes by streaming gets bigger and bigger and the long term interest of this 7 week “hit” via the most common form of music consumption is absent. It may be difficult to sustain high streaming numbers for songs remaining at number one for a while, but the flip side is there is an inverse relationship present where the song’s radio presence increases over time instead. This inverse relationship has occurred many times, as seen in Fig. 1 ‘Rockstar’ (62.1m), ‘Mood’ (86.5m), ‘Driver’s License’ (73.2m) and ‘Leave the Door Open’ (87m) have achieved this. Butter has peaked and saturated itself at around 25m-to-30m audience impressions every week, which is the weakest radio performance of a multi-week number one over the past year. So two-for-two, things don’t look too good. Yet, what is clear when BTS hit the top spot the digital sales line spikes every time. While digital singles sales have mostly remained flat in the past year across the industry, indicating this is a method of music consumption most people are not using nowadays, BTS’ US audience are demonstrating their commitment to mostly consuming their music via online retail purchases. The worldwide complaints of ‘fraudulence’ arise from the fact that numerous copies of the same song under the guise of different titles (to bypass limits of a single song being counted by auditors), or niche items such as cassettes or vinyl are being sold. Such a way of this happening can be seen in Figure 2. 

Figure 2.

Figure 3.

Figure 3 is a series of bar charts showing the average chart position of the number one song across all metrics. While the Hot 100 formula metrics are not directly split equally (leaning more towards streaming and radio), in this investigation it actually provides the digital sales metric with some extra leverage. This is similar to the Billboard decade-end charts, which are based on inverse points as opposed to the raw figures – this method has been chosen to ensure every song has equal opportunity when presenting their data. Fig. 3 has collected the chart positions of radio, streaming and sales for every number one hit over the past year, and has taken an average to display the average position of the top spot songs. Note: songs where one of the metrics are not present, so in this case a lot of debut number ones, have not been included as the weighting of the other two metrics would create different results, throwing off the average and deeming this test as inaccurate. The macrocosm is to get as close to 1.0 as possible as it indicates the song’s metrics across the board are aligned at the top, thus fairly rewarding it number one. The magic number for the average (M) and standard deviation (SD) points required to hit the top spot comfortably was 5.76 +/- 5.75 points, with the high SD predominantly being contributed to Butter’s constant underperformance. Butter sat 2 SDs below the M for 4/7 weeks, and sits on the fence for its other 3, inferring it always never aligns with the dataset’s comparator songs. Despite digital sales having an advantage of being bolstered in this investigation, Butter is consistently underperforming week-on-week, debuting with 14.67 points and moving down as far as 18.33 points. Despite inflections in some weeks of its digital sales run in Fig. 1, the lack of streaming and poor radio listenership is contributing Butter to a weak average performance – it is only holding itself up by the immense digital sales. Fig. 3 also shows that despite Week 2 and Week 5 showing promise of growth, the general trend is the song is becoming weaker as time goes by. This goes against the general trend where songs of this magnitude generally get stronger across all metrics as the weeks go by, as is the case with ‘Mood’ (ranging from 5.33 to 1.33) and ‘Driver’s License’ (ranging 12.67 to 2.33). While there are other weak singles such as ‘WAP’, ‘Dynamite’ and ‘Positions’ none of the songs have held the top spot for a continuous period probably due to another competitive single taking over instead. If we were using this method to count towards the number one song, Good 4 U fits the mould to be the deserved number one song instead. 

Looking back Long Term

Figure 4. Weeks 5, 6 and 7 (see below for description).

Figure 4 takes a similar approach to Fig. 3, where it is showing the average chart position of the number one song across all metrics again. However, it is comparing Butter against all number ones of the past 5 years who have attained 5, 6 and 7 weeks atop. The chart begins at ‘One Dance’ for two reasons. One, it’s indicative that streaming by this point had become the primary method of music consumption in the US, and two, it neatly tracks back exactly 5 years; rather than messily beginning at the start of 2016, which was also still a time where the Hot 100 was under calibration as the shift of pure sales to sales-plus-streaming was taking place. Also the streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music were considerably weaker in previous years as consumers were adjusting to the medium, so these songs would have needed to succeed alongside digital sales and radio too. That makes it an even stronger case that Butter does not fit the mould of a multi-week number one in 2021, and in Fig. 1 it is all too obvious to see week-on-week the weak song is an outlier compared to its comparators. Even with lower performing peers such as ‘Girls Like You’ and ‘The Box’, Butter (red) positions itself too far out against the average, and even more so when number 2 song ‘Good 4 U’ (green) again falls in line with the other comparators. In the cases of ‘Girls Like You’ and ‘The Box’, these songs generally held 2 metrics in the Top 10, and one metric circling around the Top 15. However, in the case of Butter, it consistently holds atop digital sales, but lingers around the 21 – 40 position on both streaming and radio demonstrating its lack of support or interest. In Week 5, 6 and 7, the M and SD was 3.60 +/- 2.92, 3.46 +/- 3.92, 3.83 +/- 3.55 points, respectively. With Butter getting 13.67, 18.33 and 16.00 points in each respective week, and each time falling 3 SDs under the mean, Butter is never representative of the population in the dataset, meaning it shouldn’t be sitting atop – it’s always just too far spread out. Seeing as going the opposite way would imply going into negative values, which is not possible, it indicates just how weak Butter’s values are against its data peers. Note: the major limitation of this study in both Figure 3 and Figure 4 is there isn’t a large number of observations [54 in Fig. 3, 19 in Fig. 3], constrained by the lack of datapoints available in order to make an even stronger argument.

Well how is Butter performing on an international scale?

Figure 5. Note: The Y-axis scale is inversely-related to chart performance. So Y = 100 = 1, 99 = 2, and so on. A star symbol denotes the song dropped out after that week.

Figure 5 is a line chart, comparing the chart run of Butter in the top 10 music markets worldwide according to the most recent IFPI report. Fig. 5 shows that all countries recorded Butter as having debuted within the top 10 in its first available charting week. However, the song faltered in most countries dropping out of the charts completely in the Netherlands, France and Germany within a matter of weeks. In Australia, UK and Canada the song has been weakening week by week. Aside from the US, APAC regions is where Butter has sustained, which the latter understandably makes sense as K-Pop has a larger audience there, has a more welcome reception there and is the area where the band originates from. Note: there is no similar chart available in the China market, therefore it has not been included. Nevertheless, it would be understandable if the genre or the artist is unique to one region and that would be the reason for its general underperformance, but for BTS releasing a song with huge dance-pop elements it has commanded a weak presence internationally. So why specifically has it been able to succeed solely in the world’s most difficult and competitive market, the US, when it has faltered in other Western countries? 

To read HOW they have been capable of this 7 week stint…click here for Part 2.