French Montana Is Being Accused Of Faking Spotify Streams, But He Says 50 Cent Is Framing Him
Strap in, this is a wild ride.
In a bigger plot twist bigger than Parasite, French Montana has responded to accusations that he’s hacking Spotify to inflate streams for a recent single by suggesting that 50 Cent, who he’s feuding with, is in fact framing him. Alright.
The song in question is ‘Writing On The Fall’, a September release featuring Cardi B and Post Malone off his third album MONTANA. At release, it hit a peak of #56 on the US Billboard 100 charts, which is pretty low considering its star-power.
But a sudden leap in streams on Spotify has got users suspicious, as the song hit the streaming service’s top 50 songs for January 3. Seemingly, a TikTok trend is the source — but a quick look at #WOTW hashtag suggests that only six verified users have done the ‘trend’, which is some sort of sketch around passing notes at school.
The music video even features TikTok product placement, as if it was begging for the chance to get picked up on the service. Hell, if it turned Lizzo’s 2017 song and ‘Old Town Road’ into two of last year’s biggest hits, it’s not ridiculous to assume music labels are keen to get their songs viral on the platform, and would try to engineer a ‘trend’ to do so by paying influencers.
The Spotify thing gets a little odder when you look, as Twitter user @karlamagne did, at the song’s performance on other streaming services. Mind the numbers for a second.
While the song is currently sitting at #125 on Spotify’s weekly charts, its video — featuring Cardi and Post, no less — isn’t going that well at all. It’s also nowhere near that high up on Apple Music’s charts, with streaming aggregator Kworb putting the song as the 951st most-played song in the US there, but it sits at #34 on Spotify (worldwide for Apple isn’t available to compare, though it’s reportedly at #151 on Spotify).
It’s all very odd — not necessarily shady, but definitely odd. Then you add in the series of tweets from people all separately saying their Spotify account keeps playing ‘Writing On The Wall’ at random, as if they’d been hacked.
so i decided to search on twitter to see if anyone was actually listening to the song since its popular on tiktok and i found some very interesting tweets of people saying their spotify was hacked and it was playing…french montana. pic.twitter.com/XPQvSPoeD6
— karl (@karlamagne) January 2, 2020
Of course, it’s hard to verify these, but the timing of them is interesting — there’s a real trickle of accounts claiming the song keeps playing on their account across the holiday period.
Therefore, according to @karlmagne, the streams have to be fake — a theory supported, they argue, by the one million daily streams discrepancy between Spotify’s charts on January 4, and those pulled directly from Spotify.
UPDATE
despite the song’s streams increasing on spotify, it now started falling on the charts because https://t.co/1LyH3USgZ4 uses formula that detects fake streams.
as you can see WOTW gained 1.7M streams yesterday but only 751k of them were real.
do i need to say more? ?♂️ pic.twitter.com/khkcmD1mm7
— karl (@karlamagne) January 4, 2020
The thread was picked up by the likes of Complex, NME and 50 Cent, who wrote on Instagram that Montana “better start explaining right now!”, then shared some weird 300 meme.
?NOW where are the bots when you need them. No ???? emojis LOL come ? #lecheminduroi #bransoncognac pic.twitter.com/14CCbWuIy0
— 50cent (@50cent) January 4, 2020
Montana then responded not by refuting that they were fake streams — in fact, he seems to agree they are — but by suggesting 50 Cent is trying to frame him by buying out the streams.
“Go keep buying my streams and talking ‘bout faking streams,” he said in an Instagram video. “I checked on it. They all coming from New York. I did my homework. Damn you mad.”
“How you stoop that low dinosaur,” he added in the caption. “You buy fake streams on my song and try to use that against me. Wow. You that desperate. I showed paper work for 2mil now you got nothing on me, but to stoop that low. Bully days are over with you should use that money for your rap shows dinosaur”.
Montana then leaked a scene from the upcoming premiere of 50 Cent’s tv show Power, and made his own terrible photoshop memes too.
Thinking logically, it’s much more likely that Montana’s record label are inflating streams than 50 Cent is creating a convoluted three-step process towards humiliating his foe of the moment. Then again, that’s only slightly more ridiculous than most music beefs.
Jared Richards is a staff writer at Junkee, and co-host of Sleepless In Sydney. He’s on Twitter.