Rolling Stone magazine dropped the following at the end of a long article about nothing:
ON A RELATED NOTE: Anybody remember Sam Adams, the rapper who was rumored to have bought 7,500 of his own digital singles and wound up Number One on iTunes? Adams and others have thoroughly denied these nefarious actions since the rumors popped up last March, but we wonder what the economics are of pulling off such a scam. This week, Adele's 21 sold 88,000 copies, hitting Number One; better yet, in notoriously slow January, Cake reached that pinnacle with just 44,000 copies. Let's say we recorded an album in our basement, then put it for sale digitally on Amazon for $5. In addition to (probably minimal) recording costs, we could conceivably spend $220,000 buying enough copies to reach Number One on the still-influential Billboard charts. That's enough to reach overnight-sensation level, right? (It'd be even cheaper with singles, but perhaps less reliable.) This would be far more marketing/promotion expenses than we (and just about every starving musician) could afford, of course, but certainly some desperate pop-star wannabe with a trust fund or government bailout money would have the means to reach this milestone and follow it up with crazy follow-up marketing. Of course, you'd have to not get caught.
FG says: This will happen soon, if it hasn't already...
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