I read this article a couple of months ago from the AfricanHipHopBlog
It talks about how Datafile Host is a hoax and can't really account for the users that download on the platform. The guys from the African Hip Hop Blog go as far as sending emails to the cats from DataFile Host who openly agree that each time a person downloads a track it counts as two and that they cant track downloads in detail. So the question is how do they come up with the numbers that we see whenever we downloading the tracks? The other challenge is the spam or adverts that your phone downloads which could be viruses.
Either way when I read this article I never took it to heart cause I would love to see a hundreds of thousands people downloading our music so I never had a gripe with their numbers. The problem comes with tracking. How do our artists go into the corporate world and sell something that will come back and embarrass them cause DataFile Host reflected values that aren't true. When I briefed the new site I asked my developers to include a download platform which they built from scratch to the advantage of the artists. We built it so it can be able to take a million downloads per hour and download faster. The download numbers are accurate and we can also provide the artists with the detail of who,when,how and what downloaded the song. I dont want to undermine the well researched article by the africanhiphopblog so here's an extract that links to their site:
My suspicions about the service were further propelled by two events during the month of July.
The first involved an EP that I had been sent by an artist’s manager. The links wasn’t public as yet; it had only been sent to a handful of people. Yet, somehow, the project managed to surpass 500 downloads in a few hours. I then followed the link to the project’s download page and refreshed the page every 10 seconds. Each time the download number would increase, by two, three times, even more. Roughly, 30 virtual downloads were happening every minute (even though the link had not been officially released or shared by the artist).
The second instance was when Motswako rap’s pride and joy Cassper Nyovest released his latest single “Phumakim“. (and the last in the lead-up to his album Tsholofelo) It is being touted as a breakthrough because it “hit 15 000 downloads within the 1st minute of release.”
This is no small feat by any means, and I am not questioning neither Cassper nor his publicity team’s integrity.
However, the numbers failed to add up! At the time, he had about 60,000 followers on twitter, the social network first used to broadcast the link. Roughly, 25% of his following were frantically refreshing their feeds awaiting the link and immediately proceeded to download it within a minute of the link being tweeted.
This event is plausible, but not likely. That the website managed to sustain such intensive and sudden traffic is unlikely.
Click here to read the rest of the article from www.africanhhb.com And also feel free to test our download page by clicking.
