In an effort to promote his new single "Yummy989? ??? ??? ??" Justin Bieber shared a guide to hijacking music charts, encouraging international fans to stream it under a U.S. VPN.
Bieber shared a slideshow guide to boosting "Yummy" to the top of pop charts on Thursday night in a now-deleted Instagram post. The guide, which was originally created by a fan edit page, instructed fans outside the U.S. to "download a VPN app, set the VPN to the U.S., and then create a Spotify account."
By using a VPN, which stands for Virtual Private Network, international fans could hide their IP addresses and appear to stream the song from within the U.S. Billboard's Hot 100 only takes sales, radio plays, and streams within the country into account when ranking the top 100 songs of the week.
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Other stars have gotten into hot water with Billboard for international fans streaming under VPNs. In 2018, Billboard issued an official statement regarding Chinese-Canadian singer Kris Wu after fans in China used VPNs to buy his album Antareson iTunes. Wu's album release was delayed in China to coincide with his birthday, Varietyreported, so Chinese fans tried to download the album early. Antaresoutperformed Ariana Grande's thank u, next, and drew criticism from Grande's manager Scooter Braun for its questionable numbers. Braun also manages Bieber.
Which is why Twitter users think it's ironic that, in 2020, Braun's client appears to be begging for the streams that Braun once denounced.
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As music blog Genius reports, Bieber is also employing more Billboard-approved strategies to boosting his song to No. 1. He's encouraged including the song times in playlists made of just "Yummy," buying the song multiple times, and watching one of sevenmusic videos he's released for the song. Stan Twitter often pushes fans to use those practices, but artists themselves rarely endorse them.
Neither Bieber nor Braun have publicly spoken about using VPNs to manipulate numbers since the Instagram post was taken down sometime Thursday night.