Technology

The Billboard chart in question is behind a paywall.

Someone on a Reddit discussion on the same song pointed out that it could be bypassed with:

https://open.bolha.tools/ and plugging in the Billboard URL https://www.billboard.com/charts/country-digital-song-sales/

That being said, while I can see the chart, I don't see any numbers, so I'm assuming that they must be coming from somewhere else, though I don't have any reason to doubt them; it sounds like tasteofcountry.com is reputable.

That article does point out that there are a substantial number of Spotify users listening to the song, though if I remember, there was some past discussion about how various people had tried trying to game Spotify's recommendation system to try to get more people listening to their songs, so maybe someone could just be leveraging that hard?

kagis

https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/11/05/spotify-hit-with-class-action-lawsuit-alleging-discovery-mode-is-a-pay-for-play-scheme/

I'm not sure if this is what I'm remembering. I wasn't super-interested at the time, but I thought that it was talking about how some artists had been gaming the system to be more-frequently-recommended, whereas this is talking about Spotify apparently taking money to increase recommendations.

EDIT: I can't find any news story that seems to fit what I thought I remember reading. I do see a LinkedIn page talking about tactics to attack Spotify's recommendation algorithm:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/advanced-techniques-legally-hacking-spotifys-algorithm-nicolas-rabaud-eawve

So I imagine that there are probably people out there working hard to game it, though I suppose that that's probably something of a given.