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Streaming is making shady tactics easier to employ and undermining the once-impressive accolade
Earlier this week (October 16), Syracuse rapper Post Malone scored his first ever US Number One with recent single ‘Rockstar’. Released in September, the 21 Savage-featuring track has slowly climbed up the Billboard Hot 100 since, much like the song it dethroned – Cardi B‘s ‘Bodak Yellow’. Usually getting to the top of the charts is seen as a big achievement, but maybe we shouldn’t be celebrating for Malone just yet.
Part of the track’s chart success is due to a video posted to YouTube by Republic Records. Rather than it featuring the entirety of ‘Rockstar’, as you might expect, it’s just the chorus repeated on a loop for the same run time as the full song. Strange, right? According to The Fader, views of this clip count towards streaming figures, which in turn count towards chart placings. The video has nearly 45 million views at the time of writing.
Why would anyone want to listen to one chorus over and over? The way in which ‘Rockstar’ is edited in this verse doesn’t make it seem like that’s necessarily what’s happening, though – it is seamless, as if Malone did just write a song with the same lines repeated over and over. The only clues that it might not be the full track are the words “feat. 21 Savage” in the video’s title (his verse is, of course, absent here) and the link to the “full song” in the description. If you’re not paying much attention or the song comes on via YouTube’s auto-play function when you finish watching something else, you’ll be none the wiser.
It all seems more than a little underhand. If you want to use the song’s chorus to direct listeners to stream the full song, is it really necessary to loop it for nearly four minutes? Is getting a formerly hallowed Number One that way an achievement or…
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