Many rap groups artificially inflate their streams with drug money, allowing them to recover their own money: “All the rap heavyweights have cheated”, “the top seller has no value »

French rap artists singled out in an investigation into inflated and rigged streamings thanks to the laundering of money from drug trafficking.

[…]

“We buy fake streams with money from drug trafficking and we recover our own money with the revenues from listening, details an official in the sector.

At the beginning of 2017, the daily Les Échos had recovered an internal document from Snep, which worried that “some rap artists accumulate disproportionate listening scores on audio streaming platforms”.

“All the heavyweights of rap have cheated at some point,” says the former employee of a streaming platform.

“We are data analysts and we created this account because our alerts were not heard, explains one of them. (…) And in our view, the top seller currently has no value.” […]

The Parisian