YouTube is making a move to curb posting of videos that might skew the chart performance of songs. This premise, where a repeating loop of a song snippet is tagged in YouTube’s system to look like the full track, came to light around a popular single called “Rockstar” by rapper Post Malone. Some questioned the song’s rise to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart, claiming that the success was driven by a video from his label that was a loop of the chorus, with a link in the description for streaming the full track off YouTube.
A representative from YouTube said that the video service is taking steps to curtail the presence those videos. “Loop videos that feature misleading and inaccurate metadata violate YouTube policies and we are actively working to have them removed,” the rep said. “Further, any upload of a song intended to mislead a user (preview, truncated, looped) posted on YouTube to look like the original song will not contribute to any charts.”