MayorKun still wants us to believe that his career went from 0 to 1,000,0000, real quick. On his posse DMW’s new single “Back to Back”, the “Eleko” crooner decides to continue the conversation about whether his 1 million YouTube views gotten in 10 days were bought. On his verse he goes –
They say, I bought my views yeah, Iya n’ laya yin
Which roughly translates to – “whoever says I bought my views, your mother’s mother” and that’s the tamest translation. That bullet didn’t have any names on it but I won’t be surprised if I saw blood on popular music critic Osagie Alonge’s shirt either. If MayorKun chooses to use his music to insult people that point out that the obvious, that’s his prerogative but the singer’s initial response to the allegations was a lot more, shall we say, elegantly worded. He said the following in a recent interview –
If it was bought, you would know now. (From) Whoever is checking it or whoever is saying it was bought.
Challenge accepted then, let’s check.
Unfortunately, YouTube has taken away a lot of really cool features that it used to have that would have allowed us do precise analysis of the viewership of “Eleko”, so a lot of our analysis will be guestimates, bear with us.
Let’s examine videos that were released within a 2 week period before and after “Eleko”. If you look at how music videos with a similar trajectory to the song have fared, you’ll see that MayorKun wants us to suspend our belief in the process of growth for his sake.
PlayData Radio Singles Charts for the Week of May 22,2016
Kiss Daniel’s “Mama” is arguably the biggest song in the country right now, yet it hasn’t been able to crack 1 million views. Adekunle Gold’s “Ready” video has been lauded for its vibrancy and creativity but it has less than half a million views. Both of these artists are new but the success of their new songs was built on the public’s familiarity with their previous ones. You can argue that pay-for-play still distorts radio play counts on the PlayData singles charts but the counter argument to that is that both Adekunle and Daniel have 2-3 undeniable hit songs to their name and that any position on any chart is just a confirmation of same.
Number of YouTube views per video
Mayorkun literally came out of nowhere – no face, no single, no history – and his first official video is performing better than theirs by a country mile. That’s like an Accounting graduate being made CFO of a company quoted on the Nigerian Stock Exchange right after their NYSC. That’s like Filter Free coming right under Linda Ikeji on the Alexa list after less than 2 months of operations. There’s a process to success! If a cosign from Davido was all it took, then all HKN artists would have been superstars by now.
The number of times Sino Rambo, B_Red, Danagog and Deekay have featured Davido on a song
But there’s a precedence here too. Former HKN affiliate Deekay’s “Repete” video has 2 million plus views and I know I’ve heard the song on the radio before but not nearly enough times to remember a single line from it, do you? Who are the people watching these videos? This isn’t an indictment on Director X (who shot “Eleko”) or Clarence Peters (who shot “Repete”) but what’s the memorable or meme-able scene in the videos that made them go so viral so quick? They didn’t invent a new dance, there is no Korede Bello wink moment, nobody took his shirt off – why are there so many pairs of eyes watching the videos and so few pairs of ears listening to the music?
In the US, when an album comes out one week to top the Billboard charts and break this record and that record but the next week, there’s a 65+% drop in sales, questions immediately come up about whether the record label has invested some of that artist’s budget in buying back albums from the shelves. The idea is that if the larger buying public feels that an album is being patronized by so many people, they’ll feel like their missing out on something and buy into that illusion of success. It’s the same concept here.
There’s nothing wrong with faking it till you make it, just don’t think that everyone can’t see the fake in it while you’re busy making it. MayorKun and DMW need to accept defeat to calculus and common sense and move on – the YouTube views on “Eleko” are at best inorganic, at worse they are downright deceitful.