After nabbing his first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with “rockstar,” Post Malone and his label are being accused of insincere tactics to game the charts.

On Monday (Oct. 17), The FADER reported that a “weird YouTube hack helped” propel the cut to No. 1. The clip in question plays the track’s chorus on a loop, omitting verses, for 3 minutes and 38 seconds, the same amount of time as the full song. Uploaded by Republic Records on Sept. 21, the video now has more than 44 million views.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\\_209r9TMB4M

Billboard acknowledged that the plays have counted towards “rockstar’s” chart success. “U.S. streams for that clip do contribute to our songs charts, the same way an instrumental track or a remix of a song would count towards the main song’s placement if downloaded or streamed,” said the company in a statement (via Genius).

The clip, which has disabled comments, features a link to various other platforms that carry the full song, including Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, and TIDAL. This could be seen as a way to redirect fans from YouTube, which reportedly pays $0.0006 per stream, to a platform that will earn more money for the label. At $0.0110 per stream, TIDAL pays more and at $0.0038 per stream, Spotify does, as well.

Although Republic has not issued a statement, Post Malone appeared to respond to the accusations on Twitter. “whenever you live your dreams everyone wants to try to take it away from you,” he wrote. “fuck you.”

https://twitter.com/PostMalone/status/920487435406053376
https://twitter.com/PostMalone/status/920487449784184832

YouTube will continue to be an important factor on the Billboard charts. Recently, it was reported that YouTube streams, including user-generated content, will factor into the Billboard 200 albums chart.