Badshah Breaks BTS YouTube Record Thanks To Google AdWords Reportedly Paid For By Sony Music

Indian rapper Badshah’s new music video ‘Paagal’  has broken the YouTube 24 hour debut record held by BTS with 75 million views, according to his label Sony Music. But the milestone appears to have come thanks, in large part, to a big Google AdWords spend from the label.

Members to the BTS Army fan club have taken to Twitter with a variety of accusations, pointing out every possible inaccuracy and including that the video has far fewer likes than would be expected, given the volume of traffic.

As of Monday, the video had 95 million views and 596K likes.

The rapper himself all but confirmed the controversy on Instagram:

"Is it even worth it? We worked hard for this, promoted it worldwide. And what some people call fake views are not fake views. They are google ad words. Its a way of promoting your video, we bought ad words all around the world so that people could see the video all around the world…

You think artists abroad dont get paid promotions? Are you so naive? I dont want to be the one with the highest views, but someone has to be. I tried and i did it. Get over it."

Thus far neither Sony or YouTube have commented.

H/T Music Ally