The Big Business of Fake Fans

It's also a bad investment. "If you're a new artist with nothing, you have no fans, no followers, you're an idiot if you go and buy 10,000 views for your first music video," PR consultant Smotherman says.

The same is true of buying a Facebook ad to attract new "likes." Even if the band is operating with good intentions, hoping to find actual fans, casting too wide a net can be wildly problematic.

Eugene, Ore., metal band Black Hare learned that lesson earlier this year. After Facebook introduced its controversial new "promoted posts," Black Hare bought a few. Suddenly, the band had more than 65,000 fans, up from an estimated 4,000.

PHOTO BY TRACY DAKEN

Black Hare

The problem is that the fans seemed to come out of nowhere — or, more precisely, Egypt. "We were trying to push out show details," Black Hare's Tracy Daken says, but the band's Egyptian fan base had no interest in seeing shows in Oregon. Show info is buried by what Daken estimates are at least 45,000 fake fans. Facebook won't allow the band to delete individual likes, putting Black Hare in a trap: Thanks to the site's complicated algorithms, which allow only a percentage of fans to see any given post on their newsfeed, fewer legitimate Black Hare supporters will see the band's posts unless the band keep paying Facebook to promote them.

Black Hare have refused to do so. "We are probably going to get a new page by the end of the year to solve it," Daken says.

Red Seas Fire, a British prog-rock band, had similar problems after purchasing a promoted post, guitarist Peter Graves says.

"We ended up having to block the countries where the 'likes' seemed to be coming from, and once we did that for one country, they started appearing from other countries," he says in an email. Eventually the fake "likes" stopped flowing in — after his band blocked 112 countries.

As of press time, BAKER still hasn't lost any views on his "Not Gonna Wait" video. It has close to 7 million viewers — much more than the singer's next most popular video, which has 1.1 million. (Other videos on his channel range from 70,000 to 700,000.) He has an EP available on iTunes now but can't say how the sales are. "I haven't checked actually. I really don't know," he says.

His YouTube numbers vary, he says, because he hired ClearMetrics, an advertising company, to promote the "Not Gonna Wait" video. He didn't bother with the others after seeing that online views didn't translate into real-world sales. For the kind of music he makes — traditional pop — "the big labels and big radio money are still what counts," he says. "And that was never something that we had, so we tried to do the best we could with the resources available to us."

Now based in L.A. and still making music, BAKER maintains that his online fan base is legitimate. He responded to Hypebot's allegation last year in a statement: "My management did what we could to get the word out, including sending emails, broadening search terms, and a Google AdWords campaign for the first six weeks. ... It just so happened that the spike (and my now growing fan base) are on the other side of the world."