Hi everyone!
I am a marketer, specializing in ads and PR. I was running my campaign organically and doing a good job, but my life is packed with things to do. While I was feeling stressed, I came across an incredibly well-produced ad from a group of very convincing young people called "The Boost Collective."
I thought, "This ad is so well put together in terms of its pattern interrupt, targeting, and messaging. Obviously, they can do this for me, and their whole selling point is 'We don’t use bots.'"
Having used Moonstrive(Moonstrive is grand) before to ease the burden of a release, I decided it might be worth giving these guys a try. They use Meta Conversion campaigns, which I’ve used many times for clients over the years, and they’re highly effective.
On day one of the campaign, my streams went up an absurd amount—1K in a single day. I thought, "These guys are really delivering on their promises." They even sent me the six (play)lists they had added me to, and I thought, "This looks promising" since the play lists had healthy follower counts.
They claimed to be using SEO (play) listing, which is a method that leverages keywords, like "Best Country and Western Essential Soundtracks," to curate a (play)list and subtly insert songs that fit the vibe. It’s still outbound marketing, which doesn’t guarantee results, but at least there’s some curation involved. This is the framework that Boost collective have built their grift upon.
Unfortunately, it seems like they just used something like Wavr AI to make it look like they were doing what they promised on day one. (They call this "The Giant Teddy Bear at the Carnival" technique because it makes you think they’ve achieved something positive when one person walks away with a huge teddy bear, making the game seem winnable.) However, from my Spotify for Artists dashboard, I could see that only two of the (play)lists yielded any streams, and combined, they generated under 300 streams. After that, my streams per listener tanked, my follow rate plummeted, and my save rate was obliterated.
Where those 1K+ streams came from, I will absolutely never know, but I suspect it was Wavr AI or a classic bot farm. When I checked Trustpilot, I started to realize they had likely botted their own reviews, creating fake accounts just to give themselves glowing ratings. In breach of Trustpilot’s policies (which exposes them for what they are), they even posted screenshots of these fake reviews on their own website.
Now, of course, they won’t respond to my emails and haven’t since the week I foolishly gave them my money.
The most frustrating part is: why aren’t they just delivering on their promise? They’re running fantastic ads to get people to sign up, so it would take them barely any effort to actually do the job as advertised. It’s insane.
Anyway, since they’re scam artists of the highest order, damaging artists’ algorithmic reach by putting us in shady situations, I have an idea. I think everyone who’s been scammed by them should post the (play)lists they were added to in the comments of this thread and report each one to Spotify(if you care anyway). You can check a (play) list’s legitimacy here: https://www.artist.tools/bot-checker