Delusions of Grandeur
Earlier this week I wrote a guest post on Hypebot that discussed the issues of faking a fanbase and watering down the average value of a “like” or follow. I outlined a number of reasons that this was bad with a main one being that lies are irreversible.
What I didn’t get into was the idea of what a lie can do to the artist and their perception of themselves.
The image above (edited to protect the guilty) was a status posted yesterday by a DJ from the New England area. He seems pleased to be one of the top 2,000 DJs in the world according to TopDeeJays.com, a website that ranks DJs by their combined social media influence across all networks.
Methodology (from TopDeeJays.com):
Topdeejays uses an algorythm (sic) that measures general social media influence by combining Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, SoundCloud, MySpace, Last.fm and YouTube fans, subscribers and followers. In order to avoid mixing apples and oranges, it uses a unique measurement – TDJ points to rank artists by popularity. Take TDJ points as a currency to measure value of each participating social network’s members.
Here are the stats for this DJ:
There is a saying that goes, “if it smells like sh-t and tastes like sh-t then it is probably not a legitimate DJ ranking (I’m paraphrasing).” As you can see, there is a downward trend for every network. The truth is that this DJ purchased almost every “like” and follow, something that becomes instantly apparent to anyone that visits his Facebook page when they see such an engagement deficit. Someone with 10k+ fans should be averaging more than 3 “likes” per status even if only half of those fans were real.
The big issue here isn’t the deception of others, it is the deception of the DJ himself. Rather than be aware that he truly has loads of work to do in order to get anywhere close to being one of the top DJs in the world he is completely satisfied with a fake, masturbatory statistic because, let’s face it, this is much easier and self-satisfying than seeing that there are tens of thousands of DJs that are more well-known.
When you lie, it hurts you more than it could possibly hurt anyone else. It breeds complacency inside of your heart and causes you to rest on imaginary laurels.
Side-note: this DJ was booked for a Boston show on a Friday night earlier this year. Want to guess how many of his 11k fans showed up?
3.
THREE.
Perhaps three fans are 80% of his un-purchased “likes” on Facebook. In that case I suppose it was fairly impressive.
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