PropertyOfZack, Chiodos Hacked PureVolume In 2003 To Get Signed

Chiodos Hacked PureVolume In 2003 To Get Signed

August 7, 2012 ⋅ 138 notes ⋅ Comments

A new article has been posted on Chiodos that sheds light on how the band was originally signed by Equal Vision Records. The very interesting story confirms that the band hacked PureVolume and rigged themselves a higher number of plays to draw attention from labels. Check out the full story here and part of it below by clicking “Read More.”

Way back in December of 2003, an awesome website called MP3.com was shutting down. At the time, this was the legal, free music-sharing service, popular with independent musicians for promoting their work. If you were a band and had songs, you uploaded those to MP3.com. When the site shut down, others stepped in to fill the void created.

One that rose very quickly to the top was PureVolume.com. You had to re-upload your music there, or be a dinosaur. They had a Top 15 Artist Per Plays, Per Day chart on the front page. It would change throughout the day, but if you got on that, group-thinking on the internet would kick in and you would get even more hits/plays/exposure, from kids seeing you rank high and then listening to your audio player. I noticed most of the bands in the Top 15 were bands I’d never heard of, all getting unbelievable stats. This was even before the more established bands of the time had PureVolume pages.

Being a new site, PureVolume didn’t have the best fraud preventions built in to protect their player stats. There’s a list of things they did wrong that allowed bands to maximize plays by cheating. As long as the song started to buffer, it counted as a play. So if your band had five songs, you could increase your play count by five in about five seconds. Have five other members? Coordinate through AIM and get 30 plays just like that.

This part is a little fuzzy, but I think at first, you could just reload your page, and start playing each song for additional plays. I just automated that “Reload, click, pause, click, etc.” with a script or macro or something simple like that. That alone was getting us on the charts. Number 1? Maybe at times. When they fixed the “reload” and “play again” prompts, it would only count one play per song, per IP address. This was actually nice. Less competition from the cheaters that just did it manually. To get around this, I just modified the script to switch to a different open proxy before reloading. Different IPs, more plays.