‘The agenda was to make ‘Paagal’ visible’ – Badshah opens up on buying paid views for ‘Paagal’ at INR 72 Lakhs in 2020

In the current Indian film and music industry, renowned singer and rapper Badshah is one of the most in-demand singers. In addition to the songs he writes for movies, his singles become overnight successes whether it’s for Bollywood or his singles. Apart from his huge success, Badshah has been involved in multiple controversies throughout his career.

Meanwhile, Badshah recently appeared in a podcast with Raj Shamani where he broke the silence on multiple things like his rift with popular singer and rapper Honey Singh and others. He also talked about a controversy about his popular single ‘Paagal’ which was released in 2020. Several media reports claimed that Badshah has bought paid and fake views which cost him around INR 72 Lakhs to break viewership records. However, he opened up on it and said that no one can buy YouTube views.

 “You can never buy YouTube views; it’s called buying adverts from legitimate buying agencies. The agenda was to make ‘Paagal’ visible to maximum audiences and achieve a certain viewership number so that we can flex. We thought we had a global song and we wanted to advertise it to a global audience. At that time J Balvin’s ‘Mi Gente’ had dropped, and it was a huge hit and we felt Hindi shouldn’t be a barrier since music has no boundaries,” Badshah was quoted as saying by Koimoi.

I still don’t know what fake views are: Badshah

Badshah further added and said that ‘Paagal’ was a big hit in Brazil and many people from there know him because of this song. Badshah revealed that his vision was to make ‘Paagal’ a global hit because he believed that this song will do good due to its catchy music. Badshah said that he bought advertisements to spread the songs worldwide and this was the reason behind the song’s record-breaking viewership.

“‘Paagal’ is a huge hit in Brazil, and a lot of people know me because of that song. My vision was to serve ‘Paagal’ to the world, and I was okay investing legitimately whatever money it took for that crossover to happen. We bought advertisements from three agencies that were empanelled by YouTube with proper GST invoices. Unfortunately, some of our audiences started spreading the narrative of fake views. I still don’t know what fake views are.”, he further added.