BTS’ Butter Bombing? A Billboard Accounting Fraud. ii.
READING TIME: 6 MINUTES
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PART 2: So how are they doing this?
EDIT: FOREWORD NOTE: Unfortunately, due to the release of these articles, some attached social media accounts which initially helped to spread the message were found and targeted by the Army and allied parties, eventually leading to the permanent suspension of said accounts for speaking up on a truth.
The BTS Army are the watered-down musical equivalent of a grassroot movement: the overseas fans are collectively wiring money to the US fans under the disguise of hosting Paypal fundraisers (above) as an alternative method to using fake VPNs and IPs, which we know now will get filtered by Billboard (this method already poses so many wire fraud and/or money laundering risks), and from there the US fans are mass-purchasing the song through their online retailers, but mostly directly-to-consumer through artist’s website.
Youtuber and Billboard expert Mike Gondin explained to Forbes magazine that Columbia (BTS’ US distributor) and BTS’ niche audience are breaking ISRC codes too, all in order to allow bulk-buying Butter ever since its first week debuting number one. Each song’s identity is recognised by their own ISRC code, is dependent on the sound recording and differs if the new song on sale is +/- 10 seconds for example or an issued remix (as seen in the image in Part 1) - effectively a material change. But Columbia have released ‘alternative’ cover arts of the original song but still labelled them differently to appear as a separate product, which can lead to breach of US consumer law and IFPI rules stated here. It can be alleged to be a tactic to circumvent around Billboard/MRC Data potentially discarding extra copies of the same recording in their audit. And this is in addition to releasing countless remixes, which in the end all count towards the original’s total sum - similar to how Lil Nas X exploited ‘Old Town Road’, who coincidentally [or maybe not] is also on Columbia’s roster. Butter has also been specifically purchased multiple times on the US BTS website, as opposed to using the general online music retailer ITunes or Amazon Music. The loophole here is there is a maximum count limit of 1 purchase per card on the aforementioned retailers platforms (this is the result of Stuck With U vs Gooba, 18 May 2020), whereas this limit can be quadrupled and all these purchases counted if carried out the same way but directly on the US BTS website (rationale behind this decision is still under investigation).
Interestingly, according to HDD (above snippet), the recent total weekly revenue of Butter has also been lower relative to its competitors, as over time they have been frequently using the predatory pricing strategy…slashing many of its songs [or even immediately pricing] to 69 cents or as low as 39 cents, whereas its peers will be selling at 99 cents to 1.29 dollars for their music for most of their initial release period. So despite Butter selling a lot in bulk, its profit margins isn’t as beneficial for BTS long-term (seeing as the performance royalties already need to be split 7 ways just firstly for the group), and they are not meeting the revenue of ‘Good 4 U’ or even ‘Kiss Me More’. In any other industry, this behaviour would be on the line of breaching antitrust law because the BTS consumption on digital sales is almost monopolising.
It’s also demonstrating its consumers who are hogging unnecessary units, outlasting the consumer’s need which is not reflective of general consumer behaviour…what need does a band of people require more than one copy of a digital song per purchase? At best it could be considered digital pollution. In reality, it’s coined conspicuous consumption. At least in streaming, there’s algorithms and tools to identify and prevent inflated/false streams. BTS are well known for exploiting streaming parties too, especially from overseas VPNs, which allow the Army to play the same song on an endless loop, even when asleep but keeping the volume low enough to ‘outsmart’ the algorithm and pretend it’s actively listening – music engineers and data scientists have slowly now been able to detect this activity and filter them out accordingly as it doesn’t suggest general consumer behaviour. During the weekly audit process, for BTS, this can be almost 50% of all their total stream count.
So what if you raise these issues? Well it’s playing with fire, and the responses linger to mental gymnastics…the BTS Army are keen to victimise themselves, plagued with false tears and claims of xenophobia, and this denial turning to anger results in an online congregation of spam and cyber bullying. Mind you this isn’t just solely down to BTS and other fans from prolific artists are found to doing the same, but BTS exacerbate it to such an effect in an almost cult-like manner it can turn new fans / interested consumers off from consuming BTS in the first place. If further discontent, just do a general Twitter or Instagram search and discover they taunt their competitors of streaming and radio payola practices (of which, most of these 13 year olds (the primary target audience) don’t understand the difference of practise of pay-for-play vs. payola in the US), discriminate others by claiming the ‘poverty status’ of other fan groups, claim the BTS group engage with their fans so they deserve the purchase just based off that (even though most artists do this) and whine that other labels also exploit the system in multiple ways to prevent BTS from getting another statistic. Such an example of this is when @chartdata reported on 19th July 2021 on Twitter, the Group category from the VMAs would be removed in 2021 and like moths to a flame immediately 10,000 replies spurring of abuse and arrogance arose on the post with claims of a similar calibre aforementioned. Note: the follow-up tweet has now been deleted.
Since the US portray themselves as a country which exhibits fair market standards and if the Hot 100 formula is broken, the BTS Army feel it’s an obligation for them too, to exploit it. But despite these rebuttals, without facing the actual fact that they are overinflating their and BTS’ ego, as well as loading Columbia’s and BTS’ cheque, is it all worth a statistical achievement and minimum exposure in the long term…all for seemingly a current array of poor-quality products (to keep this fair BTS’ previous material attempted to be artistic), especially when the end rewards are not beneficial to themselves, they would go to such lengths? The most striking point is unfortunately, the Army and BTS still haven’t “paved the way” on anything. K-Pop is pretty non-existent in the US music market (and can assume across most Western markets too) outside of their Hot 100 chart toppers.
So why hasn’t Billboard picked up on this oddity? Well Billboard and Columbia are aiding, and seemingly rewarding, this behaviour. With every passing week, BTS clicking any BTS-Billboard related link increases their pay-per-click count. And since the BTS and their Army are constantly seeking American validation (clearly shown by the rapid decrease in music/artistic quality as a result of conforming to bottom of the barrel and sometimes outdated material, and their constant dissatisfaction of deserved exclusion from Western award shows), it just symbiotically increases Billboard’s potential ad revenue. Billboard’s other agenda is in the digital age they constantly have a pressure to compete for readers and if they can feed BTS’ ego for a time and collect their traffic, they see no harm no foul in doing so. And then why would Columbia even bother trying to obtain TTH playlisting or securing airplay, if the fans are making a tidy little profit for the distributor through these mass purchases in the first place, even if the margin is tight, as mentioned above. In this case, BTS Army are doing a disservice by preventing the team who can actually assist BTS, do their job and make these connections. It could also be because Columbia know deep down there clearly isn’t a long-term desired Western market for BTS or K-Pop. BTS are solely a cash-cow, a short term hot commodity, and artificially crafted. Before long they will become discarded. Unlike Latin, Hip-Hop, R&B and many more genres, which derive from the large Latin and African-American communities who grew up and built sounds and societies within the US, there isn’t that equivalent nor a demand for K-Pop music.
Final Views
What’s concerning is this mass-purchasing digital sales tactic is not having a knock-on effect on the rest of the industry. For an artist ‘paving the way’ it is difficult to identify who they are paving the way for. Because unlike other major sales outliers such as ‘Thriller’ and ‘21’, which obliterated the sales of their peers in their respective time periods, at least they both revived the sales of the music industry by encouraging the public to continue purchasing music of other musicians. The same cannot be said for Butter. They continuously remain an outlier (in a pejorative sense), almost monopolising the digital sales chart as mentioned above. There has been no knock-on effect which has seen other artists or their labels increase digital sales strategies (even if we are in the streaming era). One might argue Taylor Swift has exhibited the same tactics recently to get ‘Cardigan’ or ‘Willow’ atop, and while this is undeniably true in some respect, it wasn’t a consistently milked tactic for weeks on end. Her audience were more interested in the parent project, the albums Folklore and Evermore, instead and also knew better to not fall for a multitude of lazy remixes - she also succeeded very well on US streaming, which is where BTS also faltered.. She also has branched out and become a well-established brand for song writing, has long-term potential in touring, is attempting to aid establishing US feminism rights, looking to protecting the business and legal rights of musicians (of which the last two factors are part-and-parcel of her brand and music) and many other non-commercial factors, which makes her an unfair comparison in this case. BTS in some sense may not be able to say that they are capable of achieving most of the aforementioned.
Moreover, this issue is considerably reducing the credibility of Billboard Magazine, MRC Data and their owner Eldridge Industries due to their complete transparency in permitting this consumer behaviour, meanwhile displaying hypocrisy of denying Levitating’s ascension to the top spot. Many chart fans and industry peers have even resorted to moving their traffic towards alternative charts such as the Rolling Stones chart instead, as it is less subject to exploitation, and this could result in Billboard’s weakened presence in the music industry.
It will be a wildcard day if Billboard rectifies its 2020s chart retroactively if they decide to finally fix the issues in their formula, and recreate the chart to accurately represent today’s real music consumption. This has happened many times in the 70s, considerably for the mid-to-late 90s, and even recently in 2021, so it’s not a far reach to think it could be done again. But first, Billboard must accept it has a problem, acknowledge it, prevent it and this includes stopping the reward of anti-consumer behaviour of the US BTS Army.
Further Reading
