You know that the web 2.0 is getting advanced when there are click farms specially set up to defraud social networking sites.
The site in this case is MySpace and what TuneBoom Pro offer is to artificially increase the plays for bands on this popular democratic music arena. Prices range from a modest US$7 for 1,000 plays to a chart topping 10,000 plays every day for a month for a really quite reasonable US$747.
The service is particularly useful given the music industry's recent obsession with MySpace ratings. Many labels and promoters will use MySpace plays as an indication of how popular a band is and whether they're worth bothering with.
Worse still though, the service seems to have been rife in the industry itself for years.
"We have worked exclusively for the majors up until about a year ago when we offered our services to the independent artist and labels," said a TuneBoom Pro representative to Wired. "We have also been involved in A&R and promo for the majors for many years and continue to do so."
It's a pretty sorry state of affairs when the corporate world take hold of something wonderful and squeeze it by the neck until it hemorrhages money and dies, but this could be the way MySpace music goes.
People trust music sources like MySpace because they are untouched by the powers that be. We lost interest in the official charts because they became choked with the rubbish that labels spoon fed them week after week as one forgettable pop act replaced another.
Play hacking software can be tackled but when major companies are paying click farms to manually alter ratings, I'm not sure what MySpace can do about it, which is a shame because the biggest losers of all would be the independent bands themselves and, ultimately, our ears.
TuneBoom Pro (via Wired)
Related posts: MySpace Music finally announced | MySpace and MTV team up for MySpace Chart
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