Everyone agrees that having a million followers on Instagram is impressive. Or even 30,000 likes on Facebook, like one LA-based band, 'Threatin'. Why are we impressed by that? Because it means a lot of different people care about the brand or what it stands for or who the person is.

Having a 1,000 followers on a given platform puts you above average; 10,000+ puts you in the controversial 'influencer' category, and anything with multiple tens of thousands of followers indicates a substantial online following.

As Social Media reaches maturity, we're seeing the glamour and potential of what it could be wearing off – and starting to see it for what it really is.

Incredibly powerful and a gamechanger in many ways, yes. Perfect and utopian? Absolutely not. Social Media has been facing serious criticism in the last little while, including privacy concerns, but also on what legitimacy does the whole thing have, given bots and fake accounts and bots again.

The excellent MetalSucks article goes to explore, that THREATIN has faked their entire online presence. Compare and contrast 38,000 likes on Facebook to 43 monthly Spotify listeners.

As far as we know, it's not so easy to fake Spotify listeners – but the Facebook likes were all seemingly bought, and there was even a Facebook event for Bristol with 100 confirmed attendees. Except for the teensy fact that all of the confirmed attendees were located in Brazil. Hmmm.

The brutal cold irony is that in this attention economy, we are now talking about THREATIN; and not any of the other bands who did the right and honest thing.

Our gut is telling us that if THREATIN is able to ride this scandal so the band will ever be booked again, this could actually boost their career and not the other way around. The central question here is if the media hype can outweigh the deception and the scam that took place.

But is there a line to cross here? Buying fake followers, sure, that's one thing. What about faking an entire ecosystem, to get to go on tour in Europe? Well looks like Jared Threatin, seemingly the only member of THREATIN, did just that.

Jared Threatin also faked live videos on YouTube (where he cut together crowds screaming with clips of himself with instruments), posed as the booking agent communicating the exaggerated ticket sales numbers from before, and set up many websites representing fake entities made up solely for the purpose of booking this tour.

And while we can all agree this is completely despicable, it is also completely hilarious. Hilarious, and also such an interesting reflection of our time. Can someone really get away with this?

And while we definitely don't condone lies or unethical business strategies; the tour is happening and people are talking about it.

Another commentor points out
that all the effort clearly gone into this
deception could have been used to,
y'know, build an actual following.

right.

Saying that, this LA based artist has now been covered in the BBC, NME, the Guardian and pretty much the entire music publication scene in the UK on his first international tour – which Jared himself is happy to point out on his Twitter account #guesswegotplayed

While we've all been fascinated by this saga, the most interesting question remains: how is what Jared did that different to what other brands (in music, or even media and politics) do to build themselves up?

Well, the answer to that of course, is if their following consists of hearts and minds – and not just bots.

guess joke's on us, huh
#marketing #psychology #socialmedia