VZ Magazine

I imagine YouTube worked its staff overtime during the holiday season hours out in San Bruno, having figured out an algorithm (or whatever—this isn't Wired) that can detect fraudulent views. Despite that view bots utilize temporary fake IP addresses to send multiple views to SEO clients' videos, YouTube explained they had discovered some videos had more views “in a given period of time than a human can reasonably produce.” Beginning in mid-December, millions of videos discovered to be boosting view counts were deleted and banned, and over 2 billion fake views were purged from mainstream music videos.

Sony/BMG, Universal Music Group, and RCA (to make a long story short, they own everything you've ever heard of) thus far lost a combined total of 2 billion fraudulent views. Popular artists like Michael Jackson lost 283 million views, and Avril Lavigne lost 124 million. According to a view seller, even Barack Obama purchases artificial views, likes, and Twitter followers.

Many people have good reason to believe purchasing bots to accumulate fake views is cheating at success. Like payola, we know it happens on regularly scheduled radio airtime, but most of us (impoverished music columnists—as impressive a title as that sounds, it's not), well, we have completely run out of fucks to give. I've asked around. No one has any.

Views are, according to YouTube, supposed to indicate a willful act by the viewer. But is it wrong to buy YouTube views when you're a pathetic but awesome artist, competing against the impenetrable hip hop monoliths of Vevo?

My unpopular opinion is that there is nothing wrong with a little moderate boosting, even putting a little in the pockets of black hat SEO artists. The practice itself isn't anything new—and as of 2012 was no longer a secret. View botting is the employment of simple consumer psychology. I can dig that.

Unless you're using black hat SEO to redirect me to spammy ad-based content—then fuck you.

Before anyone had heard of the Lord and Savior who shall be known as “YouTube,” your average stringy-haired fedora-clad guitarist playing for tips in the Bedford Avenue Station, with his guitar case open on the subway floor, boosted on the regular. Street musicians (as I'm sure you already know) since the dawn of time have thrown a bunch of their own pre-crumpled bills into the guitar case to increase the likelihood of donations from passersby—an empty guitar case hardly ever receives a few quarters.

When I worked as a counter waitress, customers generally didn't put money into an empty tip jar. So I stuffed it with a few dollars in the morning, and suddenly, I collected more tips. I was boosting, but I genuinely deserved and had earned the tips I received by grinding away at making fancy Italian beverages for caffeine-addicted yuppies. Using group-think and consumer psychology to your advantage isn't immoral. It's simply pragmatic, and it works on yuppies excellently.

Payola, due to the limited amount of airtime on radio, should be held to a different ethical standard—radio stations should abide by the law and openly state that this is “sponsored airtime” when playing the top hits of bribery. But YouTube is a vast open expanse of lawless land; you claim your field and sometimes you buy some milk cows at a discount from your neighbor. Or whatever. You do what you have to do to get people to listen to your alt-blues music.

One particular (unnamed) indie band purchased 100k views on their latest single, and the video eventually attracted a total of 350,000 views, resulting in an increase in website traffic and album purchases. Would that band have ever received such success—and 250,000 real views—if they hadn't bought the first 100,000? Maybe not. I'm not sure if I would hold it against them, especially if the music is tight.

Pushing your video up to the “most popular” links section on YouTube isn't going to force anyone to buy your album. As music consumers, I hope we are smarter than that—we purchase music that we love, not because we think it's well-known. I hope for a lot of things, but mostly just that my generation is going to turn out okay.

If you can get people to dig your music using the black hat SEO method, you're just undermining the advertising industry. And undermining the advertising industry is a worthy endeavor.

Directing website traffic by purchasing views and likes from view-selling operations like youlikehits or addmefast is just that—directing traffic. The system doesn't favor the bands with better funding, nor is anyone buying success at the expense of poor starving artists. The cost of purchasing views from hackers is so low ($1,500 can buy you 1 million hits) that the practice has the potential to level the playing field. If your garage band called “The Only Hopes” bought $5 worth the views, cool, you do you.

But why would the biggest record companies in the world need to boost Rihanna videos? United Music Group had a total of 7 billion views before it lost 1 billion to the YouTube view purge police. And why did the music videos boosted and owned by the big three record companies merely lose view counts, while videos with fake views by independent music artists were deleted entirely?

Here's one reason from Captain Obvious: YouTube is not going to punch itself in the face, nor will it get rid all the Top 40 hits that have been purchasing fake views. Google and YouTube make some decent money from bad popular music. The other reason? Someone like Justin Bieber has enough real views, real comments, and real likes, unfortunately, that his video success is not an obvious case of having purchased an entirely fraudulent viewership.

According to the black hat community, some of those banned indie musicians are pretty bummed out, losing the only copies of their music videos (we tend to think if we own the rights to a video, it is secure on social networking sites, so oops, no back ups). Some musicians lost a couple hundred bucks, some lost a couple thousand. Some music videos had gone viral, and now may only exist in the purgatory state known as Vimeo.

Eventually someone will invent new bots that can circumvent the new filter. It's not the end of the era of the not-so-clandestine black hat market for fake views, likes, and comments. Every few months, YouTube gets hip, rolls out updates, new filters are developed, and some hackers trying to make a couple bucks on the Internet go back to the drawing board.

Currently, you can still purchase views at youlikehits or fiverr and a plethora of running sites. Just be smart about it, indie kids. Bulk up your videos with likes, don't bombard your video with 2 million hits in one day (ask about drip feeds), and buy views with long or slow retention speed rather than those that only click on the video for less than 30 seconds. If you think Google and YouTube, other than being the new web imperialists, are also stupid, you're not on the right page, man.

Keep up on the back end of Google. Take a lesson from the case of BAKER, a musician with over 4 million views on his videos who, at his live concert, could not draw a crowd of more than 30 people. Don't create a scene like that asshole. If it looks suspiciously bot-viewed, it probably is, and you're not working hard enough to plug your holes and keep shit tidy on the front end, too (sorry).

Back in October, YouTube indicated a change in how “most popular” videos would be ranked by “engagement,” otherwise known as the length of time a video has been watched. Total number of views would be secondary in determining popularity. High-retention views will thus become the new boosting commodity. Get on it, hackers.

According to YouTube TOS, the video owner is responsible for knowing whether or not their views are legit, and “may” have the account banned or terminated if found using bot views. However, this does not mean we can stage an Alinsky-like revolution. Because it's jamming cash in the pockets of YouTube and Google, don't bother purchasing a thousand fake hits for “Gangnam Style” (or Seether and Rise Against, if you're inclined to hate that stuff) in order to shut them down. The videos promoted by major record labels aren't removed, the extraneous phony views are erased, and you'll just waste your money. I'm so sorry that no revolution is unfolding.

But in the event of a civil war among competing indie musicians (probably won't happen, but we can dream), competitors could obliterate each other by view botting the shit out of other indie bands with atomic quick views. YouTube can assure mutual destruction with this sort of doomsday machine. You could get your revenge on that asshole folk artist from Fort Greene who is upping his game—just send him a nice little holiday gift package of 100k fraudulent views and watch his shitty videos go tumbling into the abyss.

If nothing else is important about this story, and if it doesn't seem I have a point, the truth is no machine runs as smoothly as the for-profit pop music market. Thrust forward the dictators of the Big Three music corporations to march in front of the pack, and it sounds like a million people goosestepping in the sidewalks to Beyonce's “I Can't Take No More.”

The saddest trombone in the world is womp-womping for you, big record companies.

It's the 70^th anniversary of the Stovall Plantation Recordings (aka The Complete Plantation Recordings) by Muddy Waters and accompanying artists. When I was 16, I was such a music snob, this was the kind of superior hip history-buff album I would buy and blast in my car stereo on my way to school. This was Muddy Waters before he was famous, way back when he played harmonica and guitar on a dilapidated porch in the Delta fields.

Most vividly I remember dangling out of the four-story window of my small apartment on the Danube River in Vienna (I was subletting for the summer) and blaring “Burr Clover Farm Blues” so that everyone passing on the street could hear the jangling old-timey guitars and the rough slide of Muddy Water's fretboard, his fingertips squeaking as they caught the strings between chord changes.

I watched the sun set over the Danube and listened to the most depressing music that has ever been recorded. This creaky album rambled and rooted like maggots through my heart. Young men called up to me, “Hey baby!” from the cobblestone streets below and I, hanging barefoot from my window, yelled mature things down at them like, “Fuck you!”

When you're missing someone, when you're down and out, when you're low on love and money, this is the only record that seems appropriate as the soundtrack for your life.

I was in possession of a piece of blues history, a single CD with 22 tracks for which I had forked over a good $20 that went straight to David fucking Geffen's bank account. And then I used the CD case as a candle holder and it is currently covered in old white wax stains.

A long time ago, there was a man named Henry “Son” Simms who worked as a corn shucker on a sharecrop in Mississippi in the 30's. He played fiddle and mandolin, and joined Louis Ford, Percy Thomas, and some other unknown guy in a fiddle band called the Son Simms Four. Nothing would be particularly noteworthy about this band—there are no full length records, just blips and short jam pieces—had they not accompanied Muddy Waters on his earliest recordings at the Stovall Plantation in Mississippi in 1942.

Alan Lomax came down to the deep South in 1941 to record some music at Muddy Water's juke joint on the plantation, a wooden structure in which (black) artists and music lovers gambled, drank whiskey and ate fried fish, and listened to Robert Johnson recordings on the juke box.

Waters, at the time in his late 20's, didn't really think he was such a great musician. After hearing these first recordings played back to him, and receiving a $20 bill from Lomax, he put his records on the juke box and played them over and over again, saying to himself, "I can do it! I can do it!" (as Waters explained in a Rolling Stone interview).

At the juke joint, he invited other musicians to play live and accompanied in early songs like “Rosalie” and “I's Be Troubled” with no idea in his quivering young mind that in 6 years, he would be a famed Chicago artist.

During these two recording sessions (the Complete Plantation Recordings issue by MCA/Geffen in 1993 includes three original interviews with the young Waters, who sounds modest and almost shy) Lomax recorded a song called “Pearlie May Blues.” The song features the fiddle band Son Simms Four.

The haunting, syrupy Southern wailing vocals on that heavy blues tune are provided by one of the band's rhythm guitarists, Percy Thomas. And no one knows, not even on the big wide Googling Internet, who the hell Percy Thomas really was, or where he died, or what he did with his musical abilities beyond recording this one lone unpopular vocal track in 1942 in a plantation juke joint.

This is exactly what keeps me up until late into the night to engage on a four hour amateur sleuth Internet search session, and I've still got nothing on this guy. Apparently he died in the 50's. If anyone can help me find out more, I'd be ever so grateful and, of course, be your best friend for life.

Other accompanists on this unique little song: Steel rhythm guitar by Muddy Waters, fiddle by Henry “Son” Simms, and another anonymous Simm's band member on mandolin.

Percy Thomas only sang one recorded song seventy years ago and he was erased, obliterated, does not have any fan pages or websites in his honor—but that song happens to be on one of the most important albums in the history of American Delta blues.

Here's my theory, after 15 years of listening to “Pearlie May Blues.” It's a love song from a black man to a slave (or sharecropper) woman, who is sleeping with her (probably white) master. The lyrics are simply not available—at all. Try as you might, you'll find very little about this song on the big ol' Internets.

Because of the inclusion of the line, “I sleep with the catfish, baby, deep down in the sea,” one might think that this song must have been written after the 1941 release of Robert Petway's song “Catfish Blues.” However, since this song was recorded in a poor juke joint in 1942, unless Robert Petway and Percy Thomas were acquaintances (Petway was from Yazoo City, Mississippi and is was an influence on Water's later work, so there's a possibility) it's more likely that the catfish deep sea lyrics were taken from the original “Deep Sea Blues” written by Tommy McClennan. But really this is nothing more than speculation.

The lyrics become incomprehensible in the middle of the song, no matter who I've asked to help me translate. Everyone puts on the same dubious squint and headshake that means, simply, “You're out of your mind to try and transcribe this.”

I've done my best to reconstruct those lyrics for the first time ever on the Internet. History is made. You're welcome.

(Lyrics written in italics are those that are indecipherable.)

Pearlie May Blues (Vocals: Percy Thomas) by Muddy Waters: 1942

Oh Pearlie May, Pearlie May

Oh where you been so long?

I said now Pearlie May, Pearlie May

Oh where you been so long?

And you didn't come home pretty mama

until the sun was shining bright.

I sleep by with the catfish baby

Lord, deep down in the sea

I sleep by with the catfish baby

Lord, now deep down in the sea

I want to have your brown skin by me

Lord, now fishing after me

I've got something to tell you woman,

(sounds like: not a high rise is on your hair?)

I've got something to tell you baby

(Not a hair is on your head?)

(sounds like: I go say bye go to ug-ly wah day wah maaah,

now I goin' fro da ho?)

I say bye bye bye baby

Lord I'll see you some sweet day

I say now bye bye bye baby

Lord I'll see you some sweet day

I may come home some old day mama

into your master's bed [?]

Oh, baby I ain't going to be too long

Baby now I ain't going to be long

'cause you brought me here pretty mama

Lord, now you treat me like your dog

I said Lord I've been your dog

Lord ever since I been your man

I said I've been your dog

Lord, ever since I been your man

Because I ain't going to be your

rolling stone no more.

Try to decipher it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5B3kAsKA_Y