Punch, Top Dawg Entertainment’s president, stopped by The Joe Budden Podcast recently and was asked directly about “the bot allegations” that have been levied by fans online in a Patreon clip that has surfaced online.
“I don’t got nothing to say about it,” he answered. “We don’t bot.”
Budden then peppered him with a series of questions where he asked if he ever purchased bots, if he knows where to purchase bots, and if he’s aware of people in the industry using bots to their advantage, with Punch answering “no” to every question except the last one, to which he added that juicing numbers has been an industry practice since the days of Myspace. “But our whole thing was like, if we do that, how are we going to know who the actual fan is?” he continued. “Like, we do a show, don’t nobody show up because it was all fake. So we purposely chose not to do that back then.”
The conversation then went into how something like bots could benefit an artist if they were in a close race to No. 1 on the charts, to which Punch replied, “If that’s your aim, then yeah, I could see that, but we never been based on actual numbers. Our true metric is seeing people in them seats at the show.”
In another clip, Punch was asked why Kendrick Lamar‘s decision to move on from the label that helped become a superstar happened so seamlessly. “It goes back to what you were saying earlier about being principled,” he answered. “We all cut from similar cloth. We understand. Kendrick fulfilled all his contractual obligations and he wanted to expand what he was doing. So, yeah, let’s do it.” He added that they still consider themselves family and pointed out that SZA was featured on “Luther,” made an appearance at the Super Bowl, and co-headlined a stadium tour.
If you want to watch the full episode, head over to The JBP Patreon.
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