Suspicious album jump: The Notorious Lightbulbs? - Suggestions

hwex9000

Gender: Male
Location: Chicago

Well, here's something you don't see every day: according to the overall chart history, the 2021 album Purple Hotel by The Notorious Lightbulbs was at #50,422 last week. It is currently #4,911. That's quite a leap, and it seems a bit ... suspect. Just wanted to bring it to attention.

albummaster
Janitor

Gender: Male
Location: Spain
Site Admin

Thanks for reporting. It's a big jump, but after checking, there seems nothing untoward going on. It's a 2021 album, which now earn points from overall charts. There's a long tail of albums with low points, so it's possible for albums to climb many places with just a few extra chart placements and this is what's happening here.

hwex9000

Gender: Male
Location: Chicago

Thanks!

Rhyner
soft silly music is meaningful magical

Gender: Male
Age: 36
Location: Utah

I'm not sure I agree with you 100% on your police work, there.
Three of the "users" who have the album on their charts have all posted from the same IP address (from the same city as the band; probably not a coincidence), and two of those accounts were created on the same day, shortly after the album's release. That seems suspicious to me.

albummaster
Janitor

Gender: Male
Location: Spain
Site Admin

Rhyner wrote:

I'm not sure I agree with you 100% on your police work, there.
Three of the "users" who have the album on their charts have all posted from the same IP address (from the same city as the band; probably not a coincidence), and two of those accounts were created on the same day, shortly after the album's release. That seems suspicious to me.

Apologies, hadn't checked the accounts in detail. Three users have added this album into a points scoring chart, two of those three users registered on the same day with the same IP address which is suspicious, but it's possible that friends/colleagues are using the site from universities, offices etc where IP addresses can be shared. The volume of ratings from these users isn't big enough to say for sure that they are trying to game the site. I agree it looks a bit suspect and something to keep an eye on.

hwex9000

Gender: Male
Location: Chicago

albummaster wrote:

The volume of ratings from these users isn't big enough to say for sure that they are trying to game the site.

They already have, though, by single-(triple-?)-handedly propelling an obscure album by an obscure band into the top 5000 of all time. It's very reminiscent of the Andy Hackbarth issue from a couple of years ago. Admittedly this isn't an earth-shattering problem in the larger scheme of things, but given the evidence I'm not sure why you're so willing to give this the benefit of the doubt.

(Although, who knows? Maybe this is how the Fishmans ball started rolling. I doubt it, though.)

hwex9000

Gender: Male
Location: Chicago

I see that this has been addressed and adjusted a bit. A little more realistic now. Thanks for looking into this!

hwex9000

Gender: Male
Location: Chicago

Thought that I might revisit this, as the album is still on only 7 lists; it looks more than ever like a case of a few determined fans who created accounts with the goal of getting the album into the chart at as high a rank as possible. If that's on the acceptable edge of legitimacy, OK, but it still looks suspicious to me (and at least one other member, per this thread).

MadhattanJack
I mean, metal is okay, but...

Gender: Male

hwcolum wrote:

Thought that I might revisit this, as the album is still on only 7 lists; it looks more than ever like a case of a few determined fans who created accounts with the goal of getting the album into the chart at as high a rank as possible. If that's on the acceptable edge of legitimacy, OK, but it still looks suspicious to me (and at least one other member, per this thread).

It's really just one guy, TroutMaskGreg, and he also added the album to the database, on the day it came out (though it wasn't the very first thing he did upon joining the site — that would be much more suspicious). At the very least, he's a very committed fan of this very obscure band (they don't even have a page on Discogs). But he's also Level 6 with 4,364 points (currently), so all in all, you really can't say he joined the site just for this one purpose. Even if he did, that's a lot of effort just to get this one album into the Top 10,000 — he's done lots of charts, so he's definitely put in more effort than a rank spammer would have. (He's never posted to the forum, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.)

I went over to Apple Music earlier today and listened to some of the album in question, and while it definitely doesn't belong in the Top 10,000 of All Time, it's not horrible or anything. The title track is actually pretty good, kinda-sorta!

All that said, one of the big problems in the music biz these days is that it's possible, if you know what you're doing, to use social media tools and things like the Spotify "playlist pitch" system to promote some pretty bad music to the point where it gets vastly more "eyeballs," if not listens, than would ever have been possible before for a band that never leaves its own house and never gets any third-party reviews. That doesn't mean the music is bad, necessarily. But what happens is, you use all these promotional "tools" and now you have a big web presence, which is great, except that none of the Google hits on your band's name are reviews, they're all just download sites, streaming services, lyric databases... It looks bad. You might try creating one-off blogs, only to find it's a waste of time, because Google sees right through that tactic and blogs get terrible Google rankings anyway. That's why someone in that position might come here — it just looks better to have the term "BestEverAlbums" visible on your first page of Google results when everything else on that page is Spotify, Tidal, Amazon, Apple Music, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Even if your album's ranking on BEA is 6,500 or even 65,000, just having the name there is helpful in a case like that.

joyofdivision

Gender: Male
Age: 49
Location: Wirral

Andy Hackbarth is surely one of the greats?