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YouTube is introducing a major change to its music chart system after discovering that artists and labels were using growth hacks to inflate how many people were watching their videos.
YouTube is no longer counting “advertising views” when it comes to the company calculating its music charts. Instead, ranking for top-watched music videos will be based on organic plays, according to a new blog post. Running music videos as advertisements in front of other YouTube videos has become common practice within the music industry since it can be counted as a view if it’s watched for a long enough amount of time.
This will help address calculated advertising campaigns that are launched specifically to land a music video on YouTube’s charts…