Our apologies if you are experiencing outages or slowness on ListenBrainz currently. First it was AI scrapers, now it’s K-pop fans…
In short, we are experiencing massive server load from an unexpected and massive increase in listen submissions. Please bear with us as the small (but mighty) ListenBrainz team works on possible mitigations.
None of your listens are being lost, they are all sitting safely in our (massively overloaded) processing queue:
This has come about because last.fm recently changed how they calculate their statistics, in order to “reduce the impact of bots and scripts on [their] charts and leaderboards”.
This has caused BTS (a K-pop group) fans to abandon last.fm en masse and shift their attention to ListenBrainz (and libre.fm). The keen eye will be able to notice a difference in ListenBrainz’ current global statistics, compared to last year.K-pop fans, if you’re reading this, please don’t šEdit/clarification: We are simply asking the few users who are gaming our charts with (very obviously) tool-assisted submissions to please stop/not to do that. The vast majority of K-pop fans, who are respectful, are always welcome here āļø
We are a very small team on a very tight budget, and don’t have the resources to absorb your onslaught. We will start pausing accounts that are found to be aggressively botting and gaming the charts, as per our code of conduct (section 9).
There’s more to dig into on this topic, for instance how these listens are being submitted, and the cultural movements and fandom that prompt this kind of mass action, but we need to be fixing queues, not writing blog posts! So we will let our informed community fill in the gaps, in the comments. Happy reading, and here’s hoping that our next update/s will be all good news.
Hi!
I appreciate you are a small team and not built to be able to deal with big fandoms. I assume this would be the same if Taylor Swift or Harry Styles fans started recommending your platform in their fandom spaces and started using your platform?
This has nothing to do with Kpop as an industry or as a genre.
It would be like TS fans coming to your app and you saying American pop fans, please don’t. Or Harry Styles fans using your platform and you saying Britpop fans please don’t.
The fact you say it about Kpop comes across xenophobic.
Of course BTS fans will listen to you as they do not want to be in spaces they aren’t welcomed, or understood.
The vast majority of fans are not bots and are not trying to game the charts. BTS fans support the artist they like through listening, buying, attending concerts, creating fan art and other fandom projects the same way other fandoms do. They are passionate about this due to the lack of radio play, media respect etc BTS get due to xenophobia, gatekeeping and racism, despite their massive demand. (Which can be proven by their current, sold out over 5 continents, world tour, the million+ people who have attended so far aren’t bots). If anyone wants proof of these things you can do a Google search and will find them, or any BTS fan will be happy to explain to anyone that genuinely wants to know. There are also many YouTube videos etc that already explain this.
You should absolutely flag non human accounts, that seem to be originating from streaming farms. No one would disagree with that.
However please do not buy into the BTS fans are bots, Kpop ‘onslaught’ narrative that has xenophobic, racist connotations. Please examine your own bias.
Here are some articles that your informed commenters may want to read in order to further inform themselves
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/grammys-best-asian-pop-music-category-op-ed
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2021/03/30/even-bts-the-biggest-band-in-the-world-have-faced-anti-asian-discrimination-and-hate/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrolli/2020/09/25/btss-achievements-and-massive-global-fan-base-speak-much-louder-than-their-racist-critics/
https://www.vogue.com/article/confessions-of-a-former-bts-skeptic
https://www.vogue.co.uk/miss-vogue/article/kpop-fans-activism
https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a35978505/bts-anti-asian-racism-condemn-violence/
https://feminisminindia.com/2018/05/28/bts-rising-fame-racism-misogyny/
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/bts-criticism-xenophobia-in-disguise
You are so kind!
But these bots are factually promoting BTS? As you said, it would be equally problematic if anyone else was doing it, but in this case it’s BTS fans taking their poor behavior from Last.FM to Listenbrainz, ruining their own reputation, making life difficult for the developers and denying everyone else an awesome service. The users doing this should be shamed to the ends of the earth who ever they are.
hello blog author. I’d like to try and clear up a few misconceptions you seem to have.
“This has caused BTS (a K-pop group) fans to abandon last.fm en masse and shift their attention to ListenBrainz (and libre.fm)”- BTS fans did not abandon last.fm due to any policy changes or upgrades. BTS fans deactivated their paid accounts due to the xenophobic and racist remarks made by staff and the community. Why would anyone stay and subject themselves to hate, for nothing more than a tracking website?
“We will start pausing accounts that are found to be aggressively botting and gaming the charts, as per our code of conduct (section 9)”- of course you should curb any botting activity you might see, but dont mistake actual streaming for betting. BTS fans are very loyal and actually enjoy the music they stream, which is matched by the very many stats you can easily found in various places.
I know tracking sites are a fun tool but at the end of the day, “botting” these sites doesn’t achieve anything for the fandom or the group. It doesn’t sell out arenas or win awards so what what would be the point?
I hope you take this comment in the manner intended, amd I hope it dispelled some of them preconceived notions and biases many people have against k-pop fans. We’re all just music lovers at heart.
You are incorrect.
Last.fm put a (very generous) cap on how many tracks you can scrobble per day. It would only have an impact on those who game the system, as it was well enough for even very enthusiastic listening. Those who don’t try to cheat by using fake scrobbles wouldn’t even notice it.
I’m a human
Are you sure?!?
Saw you over on twt. This is still so funny to me š
ARMYs left last.fm due to the way theyāve name-dropped BTS on their forum since 2025, stating they wanted to get rid of them and calling it the ākpop problemā. Their changes werenāt limited to getting rid of bot behavior, which is 100% valid and fine. They specifically aimed to target BTS and have them removed from the top of their āchartsā. ARMY is a dedicated fandom that has a high level of engagement, which is often misconstrued as bot behavior. But your servers being overloaded is evidence that we certainly are not bots, is it not? I donāt understand the vitriol many have, all we want is a place to track our streams as any fandom does. Itās unfortunate your small team is having trouble with the influx of users, but Iād like to hope thatās the extent of the problems on your end and that itās not anything rooted in hate. Best regards.
They have the app, BCD, that encourages fake scrobbling. They offer rewards for people who scrobble a BTS song or album more than a given number.
The https://b-cd.app/faq of says it.
“It is a website and app that tracks the music you listen to, a process called scrobbling. It collects your listening data from platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music or other music streaming platforms that helps you see your stats, and allows our B-CD app to verify your streams for missions and rewards.”
BCD is someone who just keeps the fandom up to date on chart data on the major streaming platforms, just like other fandoms have . They used to do so on Twitter, but were harassed off by BTS haters. They decided to build an entire site just to keep doing so in peace, and added in something to add a little more fun.
The “rewards” you speak of are online photo cards to collect, with absolutely 0 real world monetary value. It is simple gamification of the streaming being done prior to the site’s existence. The missions are simply for extra cards pulls. No mission goals ever exceed the daily stream count rules of Spotify charts, which is 20.
Fandoms such as Swifties, Grandes, Harry Styles’, Beliebers, etc., all have super fans who do heavy streaming. A few do take it to excess, but these are always a very small minority. Anyone who was caught using the “bot” methods you worry so much about would be thrown off the site. Bots, scripts, and hell, just plain song looping, is totally denounced by our fandom.
It doesn’t matter if it has monetary value or not, but it certainly rewards fake scrobbles. BTS fans openly talk about how they fake listens.
And how would you explain that some people have listened to BTS for thousands of hours each day for years? I guess they’re so much fans that the laws of physics doesn’t apply to them.
love me some new people learning about listenbrainz, but still…why overload a platform on purpose holy mother nature
Hi Iva, I assure you it was not a purposeful influx of new subscribers meant to overload the system. While it does happen due to the sheer volume of BTS fans, we do not know the capabilities or lack thereof of our destination. We are used to being told via app or site message that we have done so and most just patiently wait for the required adjustments. Our mass exodus from lastfm was because of xenophobia towards the group of young men we adore so we have spread out to other platforms, including this one.
No one is overloading it on purpose. In fact since this blog was posted BTS fans are encouraging each other to not use this platform. As I said earlier, we do not wish to be in spaces we are not welcome.
They use Last.fm to track “missions” where you have to listen (or rather scrobble) a certain number of times to get rewards.
https://b-cd.app/faq#4-0
Hi! I have let through some of the few polite comments we have gotten about this – I am not going to post the offensive ones, but our answer is basically the same to those. We are happy to get organic growth, and if that is all we were seeing, we would be struggling to cope but reasonably happy about it. But we can also see how people are listening, and that a fair bunch of the listens are not “true listens” (30 second and skip, multiple accounts streaming the same songs at exactly the same time, things like that). That’s the thing we are trying to stop (and the people we consider internet pests), not the whole fandom.
I can see why “k-pop fans, please don’t” leaves a wrong impression, so I’m sorry about that wording. We don’t want to have no k-pop fans (nor no BTS fans, since I see in several of the very offended and offensive comments that some of you consider BTS not to be k-pop). We want not to be overloaded by fraudulent streaming first of all, but additionally we need to make sure our existing users are not left unable to use the site, and right now that was becoming a problem. We are a non-profit and we don’t have a lot of resources, so it’s not trivial for us to just put up ten more servers to cope with the influx like a big company could. We will do our best to make the system cope, and we welcome any respectful fans to stay around – just please only submit the music you are actually listening to, in the amount you are listening to it.
Finally, I can promise you this is not about a hatred of k-pop or BTS (in fact, we have a small but dedicated k-pop community in MusicBrainz we quite enjoy!). If it was Taylor Swift or Nine Inch Nails or any other band’s fans causing a similar issue, we would react in the same way.
I appreciate the apology for the unfortunate wording, and clarification.
One additional comment:
Among the fraudulent behaviour patterns, you mention “multiple accounts streaming the same songs at exactly the same time”. Of course I agree that this might be the result of lazy scripting, and you’d want to block these types of submissions.
On the other hand: many fandoms (including BTS army) enjoy Stationhead, which automatically means that dozens to many tens of thousands of fans (when the band members themselves hold Stationhead parties) are happily listening to the same playlist at the same time, while chatting together. Just for an order of magnitude: the BTSofficial account on Stationhead has ~500’000 followers.
To be honest, I’m not sure how these scenarios would differ in terms of the data you’d receive from them.
Would the Stationhead parties cause tiny but still visible random distributions of the starting times for the same submitted songs?
Hi dssstafs,
Many users listening to the same song at the same time is not an issue at all, and would not trigger any bot detection.
We are specifically talking about a few accounts that submit more than 4 listens a minute, or one every 15 seconds, and do so consistently around the clock. More details in my comment below.
First impressions are important, and I’m afraid whoever wrote the initial post made a very bad one for you.
As screenshots have been widely shared of the OP, it has already been decided many will be looking elsewhere, and a few who signed up will be leaving.
Apology appreciated, but it’s just too late.
I suggest you wait to see what’s really going on for yourselves before jumping to conclusions about people next time.
Having some grace is important too.
I am sorry, but reading through these comments, all the BTS-fan replies are so entitled and passive-aggressive. You can look at the numbers and clearly see the system being gamed, bot accounts, and an intense increase in server-load which is a heavy load for this non-profit organization which a lot of people have been utilizing for many years – contributing to the crowdsourced data and participating in the community. Please try to understand the stress your community is putting the organization under, and think about why you have such a highly-offended reaction to such a mildly-annoyed snark as Ā»K-pop fans, if youāre reading this, please donātĀ«.
Just to be clear: we aren’t targeting the BTS fandom, nor do we think the fanbase as a whole is botting.
If you are here to track your listening history you are absolutely welcome.
We only paused a very small number of accounts that flagged our system for bot activity.
We’re talking about accounts sending over 4 listens a minute (one every 15 seconds) around the clock.
There is a big difference between dedicated streaming and botting.
Streaming an album on loop for 24 hours gets you 500ā800 listens a day. Completely fine.
Double that on two platforms, and you’re at 1,000ā1,600. Unusual maybe, but potentially legitimate.
However the accounts we restricted were racking up roughly 3,000-5,000 listens a day, or one song every 15 seconds.
That does not represent an organic human listening pattern and falls against our code of conduct.
Apologies for not being clearer in the first place.
Tbh those sorts of things effect our numbers negatively as they cause high filter rates and monthly deletion rates from Spotify and other platforms. This is something as a fandom we do not want happening and do not support.
I have removed the “internet pests” tag since it was being misunderstood as meaning all BTS fans rather than the ones abusing the system. Sorry about that!