Did you know that you can buy your way into the dance music charts? This is not something specific to dance music, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll concentrate solely on that here.

I kid you not. You can create a house record that is great, good, half decent, a bit dull or downright shit and get a pool of people to buy the record in order to get it to the top of the chart. Ever wondered why the charts on Beatport (and to a lesser extent, Traxsource) are filled with crap? It’s precisely because of this.

And it’s not a new practice either. Take a look at this excerpt from a Popbitch mailout in July 2020.

If I did this often enough, I could quite literally buy myself a career. I could actually send money to people and tell them to buy my own track with it. If I did it often enough, authentic sales would soon start to come along and I might later get to the point where I no longer need to engage in such a practice.

By which point, I’m being noticed by a mainstream dance press that couldn’t smell a fart in a lift, let alone spot anyone with talent, I’m getting bookings from places I never thought possible and all the ladies love me.

Of course, I wouldn’t do that, because I’m not really in favour of procuring a career through deception. But others would. And others are.

Would I expose one of them if I was to come across evidence they were doing it? Hmm…