Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber's manager Scooter Braun has followed both artists in responding to Tekashi 6ix9ine after the controversial rapper claims they bought their way to a #1 record on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
After Ariana told Tekashi to "be humble" and "grateful you're even here," Braun jumped in to school Tekashi on how the Billboard charts work. He wrote, "Only domestic streams are counted for a domestic chart. If someone is counting their total they aren't counting correctly... We never disclose our sales until end of week. That is called strategy and is and always has been our policy... Nielsen (chart compilers) and billboard rules state clearly one credit card can only buy max 4 copies. Anything above that the entire amount gets thrown out. They review that. All must be confirmed. Which it was."
Braun then alluded to Tekashi using bots to fake views for his "GOOBA" video while admitting that there was an investigation surrounding this week's charts. He stated "It was into a video that had 6 times the amount of paid bot activity than the normal video. That video was not ours."
A spokesperson for Create Music Group denied that Tekashi used bots to increase streams on his video, telling Variety, "Unequivocally, they did not use a bot farm to juice video views on 'GOOBA.'"
A Google rep also addressed the claims, stating, "YouTube takes abuse of our systems, such as attempts to artificially inflate video viewcounts, very seriously, and takes action against known abusers, including termination of their YouTube accounts. YouTube continues to employ proprietary technology to prevent the artificial inflation of a video’s view count by spam bots, malware and other means and the data we provide for the charts reflects this process."
You can check out Scooter's full statement along with Justin and Ariana's above.
Source: Variety
