French Montana has responded after a number of people — including 50 Cent — accused him of “faking” Spotify streams for one of his recent songs.
After the release of French’s third album ‘Montana’ in December, attention has turned to the apparently underwhelming success of its lead single ‘Writing on the Wall’, which features Cardi B and Post Malone.
You can watch the video for the track below.
At the time of writing, ‘Writing on the Wall’ has been streamed 74.87 million times on Spotify.
But French was accused last week (January 2) of manipulating the song’s streaming numbers, with one Twitter user @karlamagne pointing out that ‘Writing on the Wall’ had experienced a strong recent surge in popularity solely on Spotify — where it hit #21 on the US Top 50 songs on the platform despite concurrently being outside the top 1000 songs on Apple Music.
so i decided to search on twitter to see if anyone was actually listening to the song since its popular on tiktok and i found some very interesting tweets of people saying their spotify was hacked and it was playing…french montana. pic.twitter.com/XPQvSPoeD6
— karl (@karlamagne) January 2, 2020
There were then subsequent allegations made by people on Twitter who claimed that their Spotify accounts had been “hacked” to find that their device was playing ‘Writing on the Wall’, or found the song in their playback history, without their consent or knowledge.
it's more than clear that french montana's label is buying streams and trying to make it seem like the song is rising on its own because it's popular on tiktok pic.twitter.com/PkdxEpeIm5
— karl (@karlamagne) January 2, 2020
“It’s more than clear that french montana’s label is buying streams and trying to make it seem like the song is rising on its own because it’s popular on tiktok,” @karlamagne alleged in the thread, which you can read above and below.
yikes…it looks like blocking the artist isn't enough so please change your password. this is very scary. pic.twitter.com/3oUn93pqvb
— karl (@karlamagne) January 2, 2020
50 Cent subsequently responded to the allegations on Saturday (January 4) by writing on Instagram: “Boy you better start explaining RIGHT NOW!!!”
French has since denied the allegations, suggesting that 50 Cent was in fact behind the “fake” Spotify streams. The musician quote-tweeted a post which claimed just that on Saturday, adding the words: “Straight sucka for that move.”
Straight sucka for that move https://t.co/3GE1niP6r2
— French Montana (@FrencHMonTanA) January 4, 2020
Last week, French and 50 Cent’s war of words continued as the former uploaded an apparently Photoshopped image seemingly intended to damage 50’s credibility.