Fakes are outstreaming real bands
Bypass: Music Industry News for Independent Artists
Saturday edition • 3 min read
How Nathan Bank Sold Out His First Show By Giving Tickets Away
With a name like Nathan Bank, you'd expect this Mexican pop artist to be all about the money. Nope, he's all about connection. He's got 600k on TikTok but only 34k monthly listeners on Spotify, and he still self-funded his first headline show in Mexico City, which sold out.
How They Did It
He posted his ticket link and turned it into a matchmaking game.
Fans who couldn't afford tickets commented, "Yo Quiero," and fans feeling generous commented, "Yo Regalo." (Google Translate's right there.) Then he used DM automation to pair them up.
That post ended up getting 4.1k comments, and all of them put him in front of a new audience.
How You Can Too
It's all about building something fans get to be part of. You don't need to know exactly what he did. Just take a long, hard look at your ticket link and ask what your fans could do with it besides buy.
Set Up a Free Tripwire for Your Own Name
What's Up
Previously on Pimp Your Google: we told you about Hypebot's guide to check your online presence by Googling yourself in Incognito. Hope you did it. Anyway, there's more. Google Alerts. It's free, and it doesn't take up your whole afternoon to set up.
So What
Set it and forget it, kinda like your gym membership. Except this one is doing something. You get an alert anytime your name pops up online.
Think about it.
A blog reviews your music, you'll know. Someone butchers your band name in a listing, you'll know.
Now What
Go to google.com/alerts and put in your name (in quotes, by the way). Then add one for the way people always botch the spelling. You know the one.
Full guide's below if you want the settings.
They Stole This Duo's Album and Outstreamed Them 25-to-1
What's Up
A Philly folk duo, Makeshift Hammer, got ripped off, and they had to hear it from a fan. Which stings extra, because one of them is a private detective for a living. Their whole album got pitch-shifted and re-uploaded as Blue Road by Carey Dupont. The fakes pulled in around 50,000 plays per track. Meanwhile, MH's own tracks were sitting at 1,000 to 2,000.
So What
Spotify pays out based on share of total streams. That makes this fake way more than annoying because it's literally pulling money out of their pocket.
MH did report it, though. They just heard nothing back from Spotify and got an automated message from the scammers' distributor, SoundCloud. Classic.
Now What
Search up your songs but misspell them (instead of "All My Friends," search for "All My Friend"). If you don't find any knockoffs, great. But if you do, screenshot everything, then get loud. Post about it, tell your people, and don't sit around waiting on Spotify.
[Full story at Digital Music News]
While You Were Making Music…
😐 113,879 hours of YouTube Music got scraped to train Suno [but it's fair use, promise]
💀 The Michael Jackson biopic became the first ever to make $1bn [Drake's biopic could never]
Today's edition by Jordan F.
For indies who ship music, not excuses.
Related News & Guides
Spotify grades its own homework
Spotify launched Campaign Lift, a Discovery Mode metric that measures stream gains against an unverifiable predicted baseline only Spotify can see. A Metricool study of 800,000 YouTube videos found channels with 2,000 to 10,000 subscribers grow fastest, with Shorts driving over 61% of organic views. Kremlin Korps, a punk band inactive since 1984, sold out a vinyl reissue in 48 hours using Spotify for Artists and a single social media post.
Suno knew and said nothing
Suno's November data breach exposed 55.3 million accounts — including names, emails, and partial card info — but the company stayed silent for eight months. Massachusetts proposed a bill capping ticket resale at 110% of face value, backed by Noah Kahan, Pixies, MGMT, and dozens more artists. TikTok is testing an opt-in AI deepfake detection tool requiring users to verify identity through Jumio.