Vado’s “Slime Flu 4”, Fake Downloads & Hip-Hop’s Online Steroid Era Posted by Nathan S. on 08/26/13 | Filed under Opinion, Mixtapes, Sales, Vado, Pay For Post

I could spend my day posting songs and videos you barely care about and can find at eleven-million other sites, or I could write an article directly requested from RefinedHype Nation. So with that in mind, here's what John Blaze wrote in the comment section of the last podcast:

"Nathan It May Be Time To Bring Back The Fake Downloads Story Again.....Check This Out https://www.datpiff.com/Vado-Sl... Numbers Might Be A Bigger Lie Than When Meek Mill Did 2 Million In A Day With Dreamchasers 2....."

As a quick refresher, Blaze is talking about this piece, in which I dug deep into bullshit stream and download numbers on mixtapes, and how those faked numbers were fucking up the game in general.

For the record, the Fake Number Hall of Fame currently consists of Bow Wow's "Greenlight 3", Jae Millz' "The Flood Warning" and Meek Mill's "Dreamchasers 2". I don't know if I can include Vado's latest mixtape, "Slime Flu 4", "in the Hall of Fame, it doesn't quite have the same "no fucking way", hit you over the head with it's ridiculousness that Jae Millz (totally not) doing over 1 million in 24 hours did. "Slime Flu 4" is more on the Bill & Ted's"Excellent Adventure"-level: Strange things are afoot at Datpiff's "Slime Flu 4" page.

And before we really dig in, here comes the disclaimer that all the people writing "fuck you hater" comments will completely ignore and I don't know why I bother to write these things for people who don't read, it's like painting for blind people. Anyway....this post really doesn't have much to do with Vado specifically, and absolutely nothing to do with his music. To be honest I've never actually really listened to him. For all I know he's super dope; right now I don't particularly care. All I care about is thinking critically about this here interwebs rap game, the numbers we see, and how those numbers affect what music we are (and aren't) exposed to. This isn't about love or hate, it's about mathematical logic.

Got it people who didnt' just read that? No? Fuck it then, I give up. Let's get into the specifics:



First, I just don't understand Datpiff's "views" metric. I assume it means the number of people who have visited/viewed the page; so how is it so much higher than the streams and downloads? 762K people (nearly ONE MILLION, by the way) actively clicked on a link to Vado's new mixtape, got to the page, then half of them decided to just leave without copping or even listening to the free mixtape they were presumably looking for? That's like walking into a corner store to buy a bag of Doritos, getting to the chip aisle, picking up the bag of Doritos, then putting it down and walking away. And that's not a "Slime Flu 4"-specific thing, every tape on Datpiff I've seen has substantially more views. Weird; and I genuinely don't understand why Datpiff even chooses to display "views". Why would users care about how many people looked at a page? But that's small stuff, moving on....

The obvious question is the most direct - is Vado popular enough to legitimately get nearly 400K downloads? The gut instinct answer is no..."probably not" if I'm being more fair. A good quick cross reference rule is to check Twitter - it's an imperfect but decent indication of an artist's general popularity, and Vado has about 130K followers*. So even if every single one of his followers were hardcore fans who downloaded the project from Datpiff - which isn't true for any artist - for every follower who downloaded, two other people who aren't even fans enough to follow him would have to have also downloaded. (Follow that?)

Compare that another major recent Datpiff release, Chief Keef's "Bang 2"; Keef has about six times as many followers as Vado, but has only gotten one-third as many downloads. Impossible? No. Maybe Vado's fans just aren't on Twitter. Maybe Chief Keef's Twitter followers aren't as much fans likely to download a new mixtape as they are people who just want to see what crazy shit he'll tweet next. And I've seen artists move legitimate major numbers that you wouldn't expect. I've been involved in a few releases for Wax, someone I think it's safe to say isn't particularly well know in the U.S., and he'll draw relatively huge stream/download numbers thanks to his YouTube presence, more international fanbase, etc. Maybe Vado's just one of those guys who has a much larger and more loyal fanbase than anyone outside of that fanbase truly realizes. Frankly, so far this is all just conjecture.

Instead, the bigger red flag comes from the discrepancy between streams and downloads. Sure, some people (those aforementioned hardcore fans) might just download a project without listening to it first - maybe those aforementioned hardcore fans - but the numbers say nearly four times as many people have downloaded "Slime Flu 4" as listened to it. A look Datpiff shows that while other projects do have more downloads then streams, on average the two numbers are pretty close. That Chief Keef tape has 117K streams to 121K downloads. Trinidad James' "10 Pc. Mild" has 104K streams and 107K downloads, Rapsody's "She Got Game" has 14K streams and 19K downloads. I can't find another tape on Datpiff that has even twice as many downloads as streams, let alone four times more.

Even compared to his past projects, the stream-download gap looks enormous: "Slime Flu 2" has 72K streams and 60K downloads and "Slime Flu 3" has 114K streams and 173K downloads, all of which holds close to the site wide average. Even if we assume Vado has managed to increase the amount of people who want to download his tape between "Slime Flu 3" and "Slime Flu 4", it's almost impossible to think of a legitimate reason his downloads could have more than doubled while his streams simultaneously significantly decreased. Again, that gap between streams and downloads doesn't prove someone cooked the numbers and either forgot to increase streams proportional to downloads, or only knew how to cook the downloads but not the streams, but....it doesn't not prove it.

I want to be clear, I'm not accusing Vado, or anyone who works for him, of messing with the numbers, and I'm not accusing Datpiff either. It may be unlikely but completely legitimate, or just a computer error neither party had any influence over. To responsibly accuse someone of inflating numbers you need proof, and to be clear, I have absolutely no proof. However, even though I just spent an admittedly absurd amount of time analyzing Datpiff's "Slime Flu 4" stats, this really isn't about "Slime Flu 4", Datpiff or Vado. If this becomes a discussion about Vado, that'd only be a fraction of the story I'm trying to tell. Even IF something shady happened around "Slime Flu 4", that'd only be a drop in the ocean of internet music shadiness that happens every day.

I believe the rap internet game over the last five years is where baseball was in 1998, when McGwire and Sosa were both chasing previously unreachable numbers. Fans were either willingly blind to their heroes' massive forearms (and foreheads) or didn't particularly care as long as they were being entertained. Similarly, journalists (which I'll call myself loosely) were too afraid of losing access to teams, and angering individual players, to point out what was obvious to anyone who just looked at the numbers; Sammy Sosa suddenly hit almost twice as many home runs in 1998 as he did in 1997 because he was...exercising harder?

Similarly, whether in sports or hip-hop, while we may focus on the superstars, the damage artificial inflation does to the game goes far beyond those superstars. How many players looked at what Sosa and McGwire were doing and thought, "Fuck, I gotta do something too or I'm going to be out of the league"? How many lesser known artists work a full time job, pour their savings into recording a mixtape, and then when they see their social media or stream/download numbers are only a fraction of the big names, think they have to do something too or get left behind? It's exactly those artists who fall prey to all the "10K followers for $50" scams out there, and it creates an atmosphere that cheapens what it means to succeed in the game for both artists and fans.

And there aren't just "promo" stats we're talking about. With the RIAA increasingly factoring in digital stats into the charts, more streams and downloads can mean a higher spot on the charts, more booked show, etc. And just like sports and PEDs, we're just beginning to scratch the surface of what constitutes "real" vs. "fake" stats, how to regulate, and if we should even really care. (Let 'em juice/inflate download numbers, who really cares beyond the moralizers?) There are more questions than answers, and things are probably only going to get more complicated before they get simpler. The clear answers may never come, they might not even exist. So in the meantime I believe our best chance or protecting the music we all love, and protecting the next generation of artists trying to figure out for themselves what it takes to succeed, is pushing these practices into the light and then having open, intelligent and honest discussions.

RefinedHype Nation, no one does intelligent and honest better than you. I wouldn't have written this for anyone else; and while you're reading and crafting your comment, why not make "Slime Flu 4" your soundtrack?

* According to Twitter Faker, Vado's followers are 57% legit, 31% inactive and 12% fake.