Dolly Parton Godmother Lie Used to Help Push Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song”

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Shaboozey’s hit track “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” has been one of the smashes of the summer, and spent multiple weeks at #1 both on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, as well as the all-genre Billboard Hot 100. It’s a catchy song for sure, but some of the song’s success is due to how it borrows heavily from J-Kwon’s 2004 hit song “Tipsy,” as well as Zach Bryan’s musical style. That’s not the only boost it has received.

We’ve already known for a while about the manipulations possible through the unregulated world of Tik-Tok promotion, where labels and performers pay to have influencers use their songs in viral videos, or attempt to start dance crazes in a way that inadvertently promotes songs to the public. Where “payola” on radio is illegal, it’s currently the Wild West on Tik-Tok where “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” has seen significant traction.

But it appears that Shaboozey and “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” also benefited from an even more dubious and unethical boost. A company called PushPlay that uses what they call “fan fiction” to promote artists and songs was hired by Shaboozey to promote him on the Tik-Tok format. Through numerous accounts generated solely to promote Shaboozey, a PushPlay subsidiary called WtrCoolr pushed the idea that Dolly Parton was Shaboozey’s godmother, fully knowing it was a lie. It was also a lie that many people on Tik-Tok fell for.

PushPlay and WtrCoolr peddle these lies by splicing together clips and using AI to make believable videos that can be viewed and shared sometimes millions of times. The company has done similar campaigns for other performers. Hip-hop artist Young Nudy used the service to push the falsehood that basketball great Shaquille O’Neal was a superfan of his.

Speaking to the hubristic nature of the whole enterprise, when Billboard reached out to PushPlay about the practice, the founder Ethan Curtis spoke to them candidly and tried to pass off the entire thing as fun and harmless.

“We are huge fans of pop culture, fan fiction and satire,” Curtis says. “We see it as creating our own version of a Marvel Universe but with pop stars.”

But the problem is that it’s difficult to impossible for Tik-Tok users to distinguish between what is truth, and what is fiction. Ethan Curtis even goes on to say that artists and labels could use his service to war game out scenarios to gauge public sentiment. In other words, the company could lie to the public to see what the reaction might be if the lies were to become true.

“I could see a label coming to us and asking us to test how a new post-beef collab between Drake and Kendrick would be received, for example. They could say, ‘Can you create a post about this and we can see if people turn on Kendrick for backtracking, or if fans will lose their shit over them coming together?’ We could see if it’s a disaster or potentially the biggest release of their careers… I mean, if it’s been so successful on socials, why wouldn’t it be so successful in real life?”

Though some of the PushPlay and WtrCoolr accounts disclose they’re “fan fiction,” the videos themselves don’t—not that users would even know what “fan fiction” means even if they did see this in the account info. Curtis also says they sometimes use “Easter eggs” in the videos to reveal they’re not real. But those Easter eggs are rarely if ever obvious.

After the Billboard article that rightly criticized the entire enterprise, a backlash ensued and the PushPlay/WtrCoolr accounts associated with Shaboozey were taken down. But at this point, the damage is potentially already done. “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” has been the #1 song in both country and pop for multiple weeks now, and who knows what role PushPlay and other Tik-Tok manipulations played in that success.

The undermining of public trust, and the perverse incentives in the marketplace, and the unregulated nature of Tik-Tok threaten to erode the integrity of the entire music industry if they go unchecked. In this instance, at least Billboard addressed the issue in article form, though it’s unlikely to augment it’s charts to reflect the manipulations behind Shaboozey’s music. And how could they when it’s difficult to impossible to know what kind of boost the song received?

Without question, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is an infectious track that touched a nerve. But similar to the steroid era in baseball where stats and records come with asterisks beside them, you wonder if we’re living in an era when the influence of Tik-Tok will ultimately result in meaningless benchmarks that don’t accurately measure public sentiment. They just account for how much of a sponsored push a song, album, or artist received on social media, and sometimes in deceptive ways.

© 2024 Saving Country Music

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