The “Boss Baby” Bot Farm
Boost Collective is not legit.
It’s seven p.m., do you know where your children are?
We’re pretty sure the parents of Boost Collective’s four executive founders are starting to wonder where theirs are, because (let’s just start this introduction with the plot twist): Boost Collective is run by a four childhood friends, who are still very much in their childhood. At least when it comes to emotional maturity. They’re barely old enough to vote, much less make $50,000 a month scamming indie artists. And they have been making at least that much since they were only 16 years old.
We’re dealing with what we like to think of as four kids stacked on top of each other in a trench-coat, pretending to be adults: Pretending, at least, for much of their company’s six year existence. And, yes. They are a scam, too.
But, more on that later. We should probably cover the groundwork first. So, you’re probably wondering, what’s the verdict?
🐰 Verdict:
The results are in: Boost Collective is a scam. Continue reading the report for exhaustive evidence and documented acts of fraud.
Boost Collective: Playlisting and Distribution*
* Except, the scam version.
The independent music industry is filled with opportunities for artists, but it is also rife with predatory companies that exploit aspiring musicians.
One such company that has come under scrutiny is Boost Collective, a Canada-based service claiming to help artists gain streams, playlist placements, and marketing exposure. While their promises sound enticing, a deeper investigation reveals a business model built on deception, manipulation, and fraud.
Extensive research — including firsthand reports, contract reviews, and digital forensics — has identified Boost Collective as a fraudulent operation that misleads artists into paying for services that do not deliver genuine results.
Below, we dissect how this company operates, exposing their deceptive practices and the consequences artists face when engaging with them.
The Fraudulent Playlist & Distribution Model
Boost Collective forces artists to use their own distribution platform as a prerequisite for gaining access to their alleged playlist placements.
This alone is a red flag, as no legitimate playlisting service requires distribution exclusivity. The reason behind this requirement is clear: it allows them to mask bot-driven streams and avoid liability when Spotify detects artificial activity.
Boost Collective Buying Bots
A reputable distributor, such as DistroKid or TuneCore, operates independently of promotional services and actively penalizes artificial streaming activity, often removing tracks that trigger fraud detection systems.
By handling distribution in-house, Boost Collective absorbs the financial consequences while ensuring artists are left vulnerable to penalties, including music removal and account suspensions.
Many of the playlists they advertise as part of their package no longer exist, and those that do often feature only a handful of tracks — suggesting that their playlisting program is largely a facade designed to deceive customers.
Boost Collective’s Predatory Distribution Deal: A Legal Analysis
One of the most alarming aspects of Boost Collective’s business model is its distribution contract, which raises a host of legal and ethical concerns.
This document, obtained through legal Dorking methods, sheds light on how Boost manipulates its artists into disadvantageous agreements while ensuring they retain absolute control over distribution revenue, exploit artists’ music rights, and limit exit options.
After reviewing The Deal Explanation document, a few key points stand out as unorthodox, predatory, or outright deceptive. Let’s break them down.
1. Mandatory Distribution with Boost Collective
Unlike reputable distributors such as DistroKid, TuneCore, or CD Baby, which allow artists to distribute their music while retaining complete independence, Boost forces artists into exclusive distribution deals to access any of its so-called “promotion” services.
🚩 This is a massive red flag because:
- It removes an artist’s ability to distribute their music through a trusted third party.
- It locks artists into a closed ecosystem, where Boost can dictate terms without external oversight.
- It ensures Boost remains the sole financial beneficiary of any distribution revenue.
Most importantly, Spotify’s fraud detection measures target entire distribution accounts, not individual tracks.
If Boost Collective knowingly distributes botted music, artists who distribute through them risk losing their entire catalog when Spotify flags fraudulent activity.
2. The 91% Earnings Myth
Boost Collective promises artists 91% of their royalties — a number meant to look generous on paper. However, the reality is far more insidious:
- Boost controls the accounting process, meaning artists have no way of verifying whether they are receiving an actual 91% cut.
- Boost deducts hidden expenses from payouts, meaning artists could receive significantly less than expected.
- Boost claims to reinvest the 9% cut into promotion, yet no evidence of paid promotions exists in Google and Meta ad libraries.
In a traditional distribution deal, artists either pay a flat fee (which is the DistroKid model) or they give the distributor a percentage of royalties (this is the TuneCore/CD Baby model).
🐰 Boost Collective’s Distribution Scam:
DistroKid, for example, gets paid through the artist paying a flat fee for their service. TuneCore gets paid by taking a percentage of the artist’s royalties. Those are two acceptable business models for a distribution company. But in both cases, artists are free to leave whenever they want. Boost’s deal ensures that even after an artist realizes they’ve been scammed, their music remains trapped. And so does the artist. This is by design.
3. The “Unlimited License” Loophole
The contract states that Boost Collective does not claim ownership over an artist’s music — which sounds reassuring, until you read the fine print.
- Boost requires artists to grant them an unlimited license to distribute, promote, and monetize their recordings across all platforms.
- This license includes the right to sublicense, meaning Boost can sell the rights to distribute an artist’s music to third parties without consent.
- Artists are required to waive all moral rights, which removes their ability to object to how their music is used — a practice more common in work-for-hire contracts than standard distribution deals.
- This Waiving of all Moral Rights clause is highly unorthodox for any music industry service these days. Here’s why: Imagine the political party you didn’t vote for; now imagine Boost Collective wanted to sell your song to that political candidate, to be used as the theme song for their election campaign. Boost could absolutely do that under this contract, and you would have waived your right to object to it. There would be nothing you could do about it. It’s incredibly bad optics for Boost Collective to have this clause in their contract. Even the most insidious scammers would likely stop short of doing the same.
A reputable distributor never requires an artist to waive moral rights, because this would strip them of control over how their work is used or modified.
4. The “12-Month Lock-In” Clause
The contract states that the artist can terminate their deal only after 12 months, but there’s a catch:
- Artists must request takedowns through Boost’s internal system, which gives Boost full control over whether a song is actually removed.
- Boost retains the right to keep distributing music even after a takedown request is made.
- The contract does not specify a maximum timeline for takedown processing, meaning Boost could theoretically continue monetizing an artist’s music indefinitely before removal. While we cannot fully substantiate that Boost has been doing this, some of the evidence uncovered by The White Hat Initiative strongly suggests that they have, in at least one case.
This is especially concerning because many artists have reported difficulties getting their music removed from Boost’s system, often receiving no response to emails.
5. The Content ID Scam
Boost Collective’s contract explicitly allows them to claim Content ID revenue on YouTube, meaning they can:
Let’s say you signed this deal with Boost Collective. What could their content ID clause mean for you?
Boost Collective Can…
💸 Monetize your music without your knowledge.
🎥 Take ad revenue from YouTube videos using your music.
🔏 Claim ownership over your music, rightfully belonging to you.
For comparison, major distributors like CD Baby and TuneCore allow artists to opt into Content ID services and provide full transparency regarding revenue splits.
🚨 Boost, on the other hand, makes Content ID an automatic condition of distribution, meaning artists may unknowingly be giving away monetization rights to their own content.
6. The “Marketing Budget” Gimmick
Boost Collective falsely markets their distribution deal as a form of investment, claiming they match artists’ earnings 1:1 in promotional funds. This sounds like an enticing deal, but it is completely unverifiable:
🐰 Boost Falsely Claims to Match Your Marketing Budget
📑 There is no public record of Boost spending money to promote any artist. Only record of them promoting themselves.
🎯 No Boost artist has ever provided evidence of a successful campaign run by Boost. (We checked).
😬 The company has been caught using deceptive Spotify for Artists screenshots to fake playlist metrics.
This is reminiscent of vanity label scams, where companies claim to invest in artists but actually just pocket the money and do nothing.
Fake Spotify Screenshots
So, we know for certain that Boost Collective faked the Spotify for Artists Dashboard screenshots that you see all over their website, paraded as some sort of Spotify success story montage. We know those shots were doctored. But, we can’t be certain how they went about it.
🕵🏼♀️ The “success story” screenshots from Spotify for Artists littering Boost Collective’s webpage are definitely suspect, given that they are all taken from the same phone, only a few minutes apart, and being able to do that would entail having access to hundreds of artist’s Spotify for Artist’s accounts, which Boost definitely should not have access to.
But given they were all apparently screenshot from the same phone at the same time of day, little else can be concluded from that information.
However, given that there are some irregularities in the screenshots themselves, they could have easily just doctored the photos to make it look like they were taken on their phone. They could’ve pulled them from the web, or re-created them by comping and removing elements.
🐰 But the odd thing is that they bothered to do this at all, as much of the screenshots are either completely unremarkable metrics (meaning, not a great selling point), or, they are absurdly indicative of bot promotion (meaning, not a great selling point).
So why they did this at all continues to elude us. It’s important to remember that these are basically kids we are dealing with, and it’s possible some of this just comes down to a lack of emotional and mental maturity. Let’s take a look at some examples of this before we move on.
From Boost’s Webpage:
Above are Boost Collective’s “success story” screenshots. The one on the far left shows definite signs of bot promotion. But that’s not really the suspicious part of any of this. We already anticipated seeing things like that.
The above image is a screenshot we took of their webpage, and it is only showing three phone images. But this was a scrollable element on their page, and there were dozens of these phone images, all displaying different account data. That’s dozens of Spotify for Artists admin accounts that they, apparently, have access to.
All of these Spotify for Artists screenshots show the time on the top of the phone, and the battery life as well. All were taken between 4:33 – 4:36 and all within 3% battery usage. That’s a lot of Spotify accounts to be able to sign into and out of that quickly. They’d likely have to enter passwords, and then of course, they’d need to take the screenshot. It would be impressive if they could do just two of these in the same one-minute-period of time, let alone dozens.
And this is a pretty big deal. Especially considering that no one should have access to your Spotify for Artists account to begin with, unless they are your manager or your record label.
No promotion company (or even distribution company) should ever have access to that. It’s dangerous and concerning to think Boost might. But if they don’t have access, then they faked these screenshots. Which is also concerning.
Even if they do have access, how they managed to sign in and out of so many accounts in just 3 minutes is a head scratcher, and it begins to look like the most probable conclusion is simply that some part of these screenshots are doctored.
But, Boost is showing immediate signs of fraudulent behavior even if these are real, because they shouldn’t have access to anyone’s Spotify for Artists account, let alone access to accounts belonging to dozens of artists.
Swipe or Click to See Slide Show:
There’s lots of ways scammers like to fake their track record, especially when it comes to photo editing. The easiest way is by simply using Photoshop, or any photo editing software with an intelligent “erase object” tool. However, this method can produce results that are detectable through the use of photo forensic tools.
To see what tools White Hat uses for this, and to play with them yourself, be sure to visit the Rabbit Holes article linked below the video.
But, if the scammer wants to doctor screenshots in a way that’s totally undetectable, there’s a pretty simple way to do that. Instead of doctoring the screenshot itself, they can simply doctor the webpage they’re about to screenshot — even if they don’t own that website or have any administrative access to it at all.
Watch the video below to see The White Hat Initiative show you how this is done, using our dev’s Spotify for Artists dashboard. The same can be done for Spotify itself. It should be noted that this doesn’t actually change the website, it just changes your view of the website on your end, and only temporarily. Basically, it’s only good for screenshots and funny party tricks.
There are plenty of examples out there of people using this trick (known as the “Inspect Element Hack” or “Span Tag Hack“) innocently or just for fun. It’s not an inherently sketchy thing to do, but it can get sketchy fast. Popular content featuring this hack includes videos of people editing their friend’s bank account page (on the bank’s website) to make it look like their friend suddenly has $1,000,000 dollars in their account.
This is a cute prank, but it’s also the exact same method that call-center scammers use in their classic “Refund” scam… in a much less fun version of the same scenario. The point is, we hope you find the video below interesting, and we encourage you to play around with this sort of stuff.
Just be sure to use your newfound powers for the forces of good, (or just to have some fun), and not for anything malicious or fraudulent.
See How Boost Collective Could Have Faked Their Screenshots:
🐰 Rabbit Hole
How Scammers Fake Their Screenshots & More
Want to learn more about how scammers pull of these insidious tricks? The more you know about what’s possible, the better you can identify it when it’s happening, and protect yourself from falling for it. Jump down this friendly rabbit hole to learn how success stories are faked! The link below will open in a new tab, so you won’t lose your place in this article. See you on the other side!
🕳️ Dive In
Final Verdict: The Contract is a Trap
Boost Collective Distribution Deal Contract:
Boost Collective’s distribution agreement is not designed to help artists grow — it is a highly restrictive, exploitative contract that traps musicians in a closed ecosystem where Boost has total financial control.
🧠 Key Takeaways:
- Artists lose the ability to distribute music independently.
- Boost has total control over accounting, making the “91% royalty” promise unverifiable.
- Artists waive crucial moral rights, allowing Boost to exploit their work freely.
- The 12-month lock-in period ensures that even dissatisfied artists can’t leave easily.
- Boost takes YouTube Content ID revenue, often without the artist’s knowledge.
- The so-called “marketing budget” is a sham — there is no proof of paid promotions.
✍🏻 If this contract were legitimate, it would be structured like a traditional distribution deal — with transparent payout models, opt-in promotional services, and a clear path to exit. Instead, it’s designed to extract maximum financial gain from artists while keeping them locked into a predatory system.
For independent musicians, signing this deal is a massive risk, and the safest course of action is to avoid Boost Collective entirely.
Playlisting: Boost Collective’s Deceptive Use of Fake Metrics
In an attempt to bolster their credibility, Boost Collective has been caught fabricating success metrics to mislead potential customers.
They frequently share manipulated screenshots from Spotify for Artists dashboards, falsely presenting artificially inflated numbers as proof of their effectiveness.
In some cases, these screenshots displayed data from multiple artists on the same device at the same time — an impossibility unless they were fabricating the results.
Rather than offering genuine promotion, their method appears to rely on botted streams or entirely fabricated data, tricking artists into believing their services yield meaningful engagement.
Boost Collective Does Not Market For You
Boost Collective aggressively markets its own services on Facebook and Instagram, which is the most popular and traditional way to market digitally.
However, Boost Collective claims over and over again that they match the marketing budgets of their clients, suggesting they put in as much money as you do in to Facebook ads.
If you spent $1000 a month on Facebook ads (which is actually the average amount an indie artist at the mid-career point spends on ad marketing per month) Boost is claiming that they will also put $1000 a month towards your ads.
Why would they match your ad budget, you might be wondering?
We can’t even begin to guess at what goes on in these kids’ heads. It doesn’t matter what reasons they have for pretending to do this, because more important is the fact that we have found no evidence whatsoever that this marketing-budget-matching has ever occurred. In fact, we have only found evidence to the contrary.
🐰 We can’t even find evidence to support that Boost has ever run a single ad, on Meta or Google, for anyone other than themselves.
🚩 There wasn’t a single ad, for any artist or even for the playlists they place their artists on, which Boost claims are not bot driven, but rather populated through highly target ad campaigns. But, they don’t really understand ads, as we will evidence later.
❌ And, that’s obviously not true for another important reason, since there is no record of Boost ever running ads for any playlists. There are, however, countless pages of active and archived ad campaigns for Boost Collective. We poured through all of them.
😳 In the end, they are all ads for Boost itself, aimed at getting artists to sign up for their playlisting and distribution services.
We have checked the entire company history on both ad platforms, using all of their known domains to perform our search, and not a single ad has ever been run, for anyone other than Boost Collective themselves.
They are claiming to run highly targeted ad campaigns that drive real listeners to an artist’s music. But that is simply a deceptive falsehood. It’s a lie.
They’re just lying, and it’s important to remember that people can say whatever they want, and often do. It does not make it true. Never take someone’s word for it.
Boost Collective posted the following conversation with Spotify’s help desk on the Canada-side domain, under their un-indexed blog.
The narrative around this screenshot was a Boost Collective rep, (probably Ronan, one of the founders who has a very identifiable narrative voice) talking about how they had recently discovered that it’s “not bad or illegal” (paraphrased) to run ads for their playlists which send traffic there directly.
This is shocking, because it’s not even basic marketing knowledge that this kind of question falls under. It’s just plain common sense.
😂 Of course you can run Meta ads for a playlist you own, that’s the standard way to grow a playlist. If they’ve been running “advanced marketing campaigns” (direct quote) for these “not-bot-driven” playlists for years now, why are they just now discovering that it’s compliant with Spotify’s policy?
And why on Earth would they be sharing this information with other rational, decently-informed individuals, as if this was going to be breaking news for anyone other than them? Because it’s not. It’s just bad optics, if anything. And if you thought that was bad, the second hand embarrassment is only just beginning, so brace yourself.
Boost Collective, Talking to Spotify About Day-One Stuff.
See the Sources These Claims Come From:
Just a friendly reminder: Always fact check any promotional company’s statements, or send it to us and we will happily do it for you.
They’ve Never Run Ads For Playlists or Other Artists.
We didn’t stop there, though. We were disheartened (but not entirely surprised) to discover, upon investigating Boost Collective’s Google and Meta ad libraries, that they had pages of active campaigns currently running, and countless pages of older, archived campaigns from the last six years since Boost Collective first materialized.
We did not find a single (active or archived) campaign promoting artist music. Or promoting playlists those artists might be placed on. Boost only promotes themselves. That is generally how scammers like to spend their money; on themselves.
See for yourself by visiting the Facebook Ad Library. The button below will take you straight to the entire history of Boost Collective’s ad campaigns. The button’s link will open in a new window so you won’t lose your spot in this article.
See For Yourself:
Visit the Facebook Ad Library
See All Current & Previous Ads Run By Boost Collective
Instead of spending that money the way they say they will, all of their ad spending is focused on acquiring more unsuspecting musicians as customers, funneling them into an ineffective and exploitative system. That’s deception, and also legally constitutes as fraud. And we’re only about half way through this mess.
More From Boost Collective’s Ad History
🕵🏼♀️ What this means is that artists who pay Boost Collective for exposure are actually funding Boost’s acquisition of more victims. Their marketing model is predatory, prioritizing the recruitment of new customers rather than fulfilling their promises to existing ones.
Reputation Manipulation
To maintain an illusion of legitimacy, Boost Collective has engaged in review manipulation. Their TrustPilot profile is filled with five-star reviews that appear to be fabricated, with many of them originating from newly created accounts that have reviewed no other businesses.
Additionally, TrustPilot itself flagged Boost Collective for suspicious review activity. On Reddit (the Internet’s unofficial source of real reviews), several posts surfaced over the last few years, citing complaints about the company’s fraudulent practices, and warnings to other artists to avoid Boost Collective.
🚩 The TrustPilot Page for Boost Collective has been Flagged for Fraudulent Reviews
Fake TrustPilot Reviews
A Quick Look at the Reviews Boost Collective Syncs to their Websites:
🕵🏼♀️ We found most of these reviewers were completely fabricated – not real people, no other reviews, no internet search result matches. The rest were either compromised, or incentivized.
Airyauna’s review (her review is the one on the bottom right of the top image, taken from the synced TrustPilot review section on Boost Collective’s website) had been used on Boost’s website multiple times, across several site versions.
We found this interesting, so we fully investigated her. She is not an artist, and does not make music – nor is there any reason to believe she has ever used Boost Collective.
Airyauna is an underage girl who had her social media hacked, and these reviews which seem to be coming from an account with her name and photo on it, is probably the least awful result of that experience. We aren’t going to show photo evidence of that, given that she’s underage and was already victimized once.
Robelle Flor is not an artist either, but there was a Spotify account for Robelle Flores. It hosted five public playlists at one time, but all are empty now.
The other accounts are either not real people, or, when they were, there was not much to report, other than that they are definitely not indie artists using a promotion company like Boost.
Many times in fake TrustPilot reviews, we see professional athletes, but they’re usually deep cuts that only a huge fan of some one-off team would recognize. Some are in college sports, as well.
The reason for this is, college and professional athletes are placed in public online databases that showcase the team and its roster. These websites include photos, first and last names, home towns, height, weight, and other attributes – all of which is highly valuable information to companies that want to create fake accounts.
There were two professional athletes (a hockey player and a JC baseball player) layered within the TrustPilot reviews. They obviously are not using Boost Collective, and neither had a web presence giving any indication that they had ever pursued music, even as a hobby.
Some reviewers appear to have had their accounts hacked, and dummy accounts created in their name using TrustPilot. Some platforms sell reviews, and write them using these dummy accounts. Scam companies buy those reviews, using one lie to cover up another.
If you remember the last Music Scam Alert article for RealPlaylists, you’ll likely remember us finding many real people within their TrustPilot reviews, but the catch was – none of them actually wrote those reviews.
One of the funniest examples of this was a review left by a man who turned out to be an ecological field researcher, who was knee deep in the Canadian wetlands, researching the migratory patterns of Geese, on the very day he supposedly left the TrustPilot review. A Twitter post he shared on the same day showed him in the marshes, noting that he was doing field work all week. Unlikely he’d stop to leave a quick incentivized review while trying to note Goose behavior, up to his waist in waders out in the water. This kind of thing is something we are beginning to see a lot more of, unfortunately.
Still other reviewers seem to come form willing participation, but that doesn’t mean they are a real review. These reviewers appear to be involved with sketchy incentive platforms, like we were just mentioning a moment ago. Think SweatCoin, but for scammers. These are platforms where you get paid a small amount of money or receive redeemable points for writing reviews for various companies, which the platform then (somewhat illegally) syncs to sites like TrustPilot. All you have to do to qualify for these incentive sites is to sign up and say that you’ve used the service.
These platforms encourage users to leave 5 star reviews, with some even going as far as to not reward any reviews that fall short of that. These incentivized review platforms fall into a legal gray area for now, and are not well regulated. However, they seem to be falling off quickly, as it becomes increasingly cheaper and easier to run the same scam using bots instead.
From TrustPilot Website: Boost Collective Reviews
Now for the reviews Boost Collective didn’t add to their website. We will only be focusing on the positive reviews here, as the negative ones are just sort of a hat on a hat at this point.
What We Researched:
Below this text portion you’ll see a drop-down box. Within the drop-down box are screenshots taken while researching TrustPilot reviews for Boost Collective. Note that we could not include all of them here, but we did investigate every review that was left. Then, we thoroughly investigated all of the reviewers that had any sort of information attached, like a name or a photo.
What We Found:
Most of the happy customers turned out to be paid reviewers, which is why Boost Collective has been flagged by TrustPilot (seen in the first photo, within the drop down box below). However, many turned out to be not at all real. Just made up people and bot accounts.
TrustPilot is attempting to combat their bot problem, but in the meantime, don’t take every review you see on there as if it’s absolutely real. Most are not.
How Many Reviews Were Real?
We could not find a single happy customer that was real, really an artist, and retained their stream count on Spotify. Most reviewers were fake, and some were real people but not real artists (fake accounts made from hacked real-accounts and sold on the dark web to various scam companies).
Of the reviewers who were real people, and real artists, those among them who had reviewed the service positively have since had all of their stream data wiped from Spotify – a clear indication of bot promotion. Often scammers like to make sure their clients leave positive reviews as quickly as possible, usually for a discount or small reward.
How Do You Know Boost Was The One Who Botted Them?
The songs in question all carry the Boost Collective copyright information (seen at the bottom of the song-page on Spotify, where the Record label and date usually go, or, if the song was released by a DistroKid Free user, it will be DK followed by a string of numbers, such as DK100000). See Below.
📸 See What the Boost Collective Copyright Looks Like:
This demonstrated that they do indeed claim and retain full ownership of the artist’s music when distributed through them. It also evidenced that Boost Collective is the culprit behind the fraudulent promotion affecting those songs.
🕵🏼♀️ See The Evidence: Fake TrustPilot Reviews
📸 See Who These Happy Customers Really Are….
Below are screenshots taken while researching TrustPilot reviews for Boost Collective.
Note that we could not include them here, but we investigated all of the ones that had any sort of information attached, like a name or a photo.
To skip this photo section, simply click anywhere outside of this column to collapse this drop down menu.
Censoring Reddit Threads
By using legal OSINT search methods, we were able to find archived Reddit threads that had been, at some point, deleted or muted by the OP.
This is something we see quite commonly with scammers. Scammers know how to make sure that anyone using Reddit as an early alert system — sounding the alarm to warn other artists — gets bombarded with private threats and public bullying.
🗑️ The scam company does this, hoping they can effectively scare the OPs into silence. And bully them into removing their post. This works all too well, unfortunately.
From Real Reddit Users:
The ability to censor a true public forum like Reddit is an important tool within a fraudsters arsenal of deceptions. Because people who search Google to vet a company’s legitimacy often search “is X company legit? Reddit” now Reddit has become a sort of TrustPilot in its own right. Often, trusted even more. And often, that trust is better placed in Reddit.
This practice of censoring negative reviews on Reddit works all too often. Most people who post a negative review on Reddit are just trying to do the right thing by warning other artists who could potentially fall victim to the same scam. But, a good person who does this kind of good deed will only defend it within reason.
There’s simply no benefit to leaving a post up that is causing the victim to be directly pursued by the company who defrauded them, and this kind of fear mongering can go on for months, with the victim being stalked across social platforms, privately threatened, and publicly harassed.
That’s why this censoring method tends to be so highly effective. People will of course stick their neck out for each other, but they won’t stick their neck on the chopping block.
📫 And we fully encourage our readers to do the same. Report any potential scams to us; we have lawyers to handle the chopping block, and White Hat to handle any digital blow back.
In this case, multiple artists who left negative reviews on Reddit (as OPs and within the comments of other Boost Collective related threads) appeared to have been scared or coerced in to removing or muting those posts.
As a result, only one or two threads concerning Boost Collective remains live and accessible to date. We will link you to the archived posts here, for reference.
See The Reddit Threads
This deliberate suppression of criticism allows them to appear credible while hiding the numerous dissatisfied customers who have been deceived.
How to Find Honest Reviews
Scammers like to flood TrustPilot with fake reviews, while censoring any real ones on Reddit. While neither one is perfectly trustworthy because of this, you are probably better off looking for insights on a platform like Reddit (or, check with us!).
Any aggregate of user-contributed content will naturally have a higher chance of being real, unmotivated reviews — which is what Reddit is (users contribute the content there).
However, when dealing with systematic-content aggregates, where the content is managed by an internal system, there will be more opportunity to exploit that type of platform, as the general lack of oversight on a micro level creates a perfect opportunity for people to take advantage of it, and so the incidence of that system being abused will increase as a result.
In short, TrustPilot is probably fine if you’re looking into, say, a plumbing company. But we advise that our readers take TrustPilot reviews with a grain of salt, when dealing with promotion or marketing companies.
Equally, don’t assume that a company is on the level, just because you can’t find anyone saying anything bad about them on Reddit. Those posts might have been taken down, muted, or archived after the OP gets harassed by the company for calling them out.
🐰 Manipulating TrustPilot Reviews and Censoring Reddit Threads is commonplace for anyone engaging in fraudulent business practices. It allows them to operate as if they are fulfilling promised services, without ever actually doing that. Without the ability to manipulate these systems, the public would catch on to the grift pretty quickly, and the scammers would be out of business as quickly as they had started. Which, to be fair, is sometimes how it works out for them anyway.
We Found Their Bot Playlists.
A growing number of artists have reported unusual streaming activity after engaging with Boost Collective. These patterns include sudden, massive spikes in streams followed by immediate declines, a hallmark of artificial engagement.
🐰 Every playlist we found that was put up by Boost, as well as with any song on it or any song containing the Boost Collective copyright – we saw a gut wrenching pattern: In almost every case, every single stream had been removed. This is true for almost every song owned by Boost. We will give a quick overview of what Boost is trying to do here, and then we’ll show you what we found.
🧠 How this Scam Works:
Normally, when Spotify removes the streams on a botted song, this works to detour the artist from paying for that sketchy promotion again (assuming they weren’t bot attacked instead).
That’s because, whether or not the artist knowingly paid for a bot playlist placement, they’re certainly not going to use the promo service again, because the whole point of paying for it was to get their streams up quickly. If those streams go away, Spotify assumes they’ll have no incentive to pay for that playlist service again.
And that’s true – but Boost has found a workaround. Boost owns these songs, and promotes them, and distributes them.
Since Boost isn’t the artist making these songs, they don’t care about the vanity metrics like an artist might.
This scam works uniquely well, because Boost wears every hat in this scenario. They’re the owner, distributor, and promoter.
Why This Scam Works:
All the systems in place that provide checks and balances and prevent fraud were created under the assumption that no single entity would ever operate as all three. Even the most DIY indie artist at least uses a third party distributor, like DistroKid.
1️⃣ Boost is the Distributor
📦 Since Boost is the distributor of these songs, they don’t care if Spotify discovers they’re being botted. They just pay the fine.
2️⃣ Boost is the Promoter
📢 Since Boost is also the promoter of these songs, they bot the heck out of them and collect the paycheck.
3️⃣ Boost is the Owner
🐰 Since Boost owns those songs, they are able to collect the royalties on them. Users report never being paid through Boost’s distribution company. They even use a “points” system to award the royalty split to their artists, instead of telling them how much money they actually have in the bank.
Even though Spotify attempts to cut the royalties on bot streams, it takes months for that detection to happen, if it does as all.
Boost still collects royalties in the meantime, and then they can simply re-upload the song and start again, or release it under a different “version” or simply move on to any of the other countless songs they’ve collected the master rights to through their insidious distribution deals.
🕵🏼♀️ We Found Their “Playlists”
They’re not meant to be found by users wanting to listen to music. They’re just vehicles for bot traffic. This one would have never been located, but we found a deeply indexed copy of it by Dorking.
Even more concerning, some artists noticed that their top streaming location was India, despite Boost claiming their playlist’s are driven by ads, targeting a completely different audience and demographic — a strong indication that Boost is using bot farms to inflate numbers.
Spotify actively detects and removes songs that exhibit these fraudulent patterns, and several artists have found their entire catalogs penalized or even removed due to Boost’s underhanded tactics.
🤖 Engaging with Boost Collective not only fails to provide meaningful growth, but it also risks an artist’s long-term standing on streaming platforms.
🎬 A Real Bot Farm Used By Scam Playlist Companies.
Legal Disputes & Questionable Ethics
Boost Collective has been involved in legal disputes over domain ownership, most notably in 2022 when they attempted to forcefully take control of a domain that was already owned by another entity.
It’s important to note that the company they were attempting to steal their domain from was not just another pop-up promo operation.
The Boost!Collective organization that the Boost Collective founders, Damian Barbu, Matthias Bruckeder, Jabari Banza, and Ronan Mullins, went after was not just another shady promo company.
Front, Left: Ronan Mullins, Damian Barbu, Andrew Wang
The owners of the company that the boys were attacking (as teenagers, no less) were two women doing charitable work. The company that had been using the domain, boostcollective-dot-com, for quite some time.
This was not some equally disposable, fly-by-night, half-hearted business venture. This was someone else’s life’s work, and truly their labor of love.
This disparity is evidenced by the pained manner in which the owner of the original Boost!Collective speaks about the ordeal, taking place within the contents of the official court ruling document (linked at the end of this section).
The original domain owners asked the BC boys to give up their attempts to keep the domain name. This shows that the rightful owners had to plead for reasonableness, suggesting the BC boys’ character.
⚖️ Damian Barbu, Boost Collective CEO, responded to these requests in an official capacity, and was quoted within the court documents. His response to the respondent’s pleas is an even clearer indication of the Boost Collective boys’ callous disregard for the rights of the business venture that predated them, as well as a complete lack of empathy towards the reasonable and heartfelt attempts made by Jacqueline Koch and her partner, Janinne Brunyee, to compromise with the boys and end the legal dispute. This document further pronounces the emotional immaturity and utter lack of legal knowledge demonstrated by the Boost Collective founders.
Jacqueline’s business wasn’t just some other faceless corporation Damian and the other three kids-stacked-in-a-trench-coat were fighting with over this domain name.
🥺 The original Boost! Collective was essentially a charity (though not a nonprofit), which was an all-female-owned alliance, serving underrepresented and marginalized demographics through ethical (and often downright benevolent) marketing efforts. It’s as noble as business ever gets.
⚖️ This charitable originator of the boostcollective(.)com domain went by the company name, Boost! Collective, and had been in operation since Damian, Jabari, Ronan and Matthias were still in diapers. (Which, granted, isn’t really that long ago… but Jacqueline and Janinne’s company and domain usage predates their scam-counterparts by at least four years).
🕵🏼♀️ Evidence: Official Court Document
👩🏻⚖️ This dispute resulted in a ruling against Boost Collective, reinforcing their track record of bad-faith behavior. Their willingness to engage in unethical and legally dubious activity further demonstrates that their entire operation is built on deception.
Meet the Kids Stacked in a Trench Coat:
If the fraudulent business model wasn’t concerning enough, the individuals behind Boost Collective make the entire situation even more absurd.
The company was founded by Damian Barbu, Matthias Bruckeder, Jabari Banza, and Ronan Mullins — some of whom were minors when they sought investor funding.
See the Process:
Below are screenshots & notes taken from our actual research, in real time.
🕵🏼♀️ Photo Evidence
📸 See The Photo Evidence Here. Just Click Me.
Below are photos from our investigation process. To skip the photo evidence section, just collapse the drop-down.
🕵🏼♀️ Evidence: Dorked PDF #2 – Boost Collective
Age Concealment
🕵🏼♀️ Boost Collective’s founding members were involved in several acts of fraud from the get-go, but their likely-concealment of their ages during fundraising efforts raises serious ethical concerns. Were investors misled into believing they were dealing with seasoned professionals? Given Boost’s pattern of deception, this wouldn’t be surprising.
Beyond their questionable backgrounds, these individuals have displayed a shocking lack of understanding of how the music industry works.
Dorked Documents Revealed
Snippets from Other Dorked Documents, Authored by Boost Collective and Demonstrative of their Lack of Industry Knowledge and Their Deliberate Misrepresentation of Music Promotion and How Spotify Playlists Work.
🕵🏼♀️ Photo Evidence
📸 See The Photos Here. Just Click Me.
Below are some photos from the Ebook. To skip over the photo section, just collapse the drop-down.
At one point, Boost either confused or deliberately misrepresented how Spotify’s algorithmic playlists function, falsely claiming that they could place artists on Release Radar.
🚩 Release Radar Can’t Be Pitched, & Isn’t Editorial. Misinformation.
🕵🏼♀️ Evidence: Dorked PDF #3 – By Boost Collective
Spotify’s Algorithmic Playlists: How They Actually Work
Algorithmic playlists — such as Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and Radio Mixes — are completely automated and customized for each individual Spotify user. Unlike editorial playlists, no human curates these lists, and no third-party service can manually place songs on them.
Discover Weekly, for example, is generated based on Spotify’s AI analyzing user interaction — including how often listeners repeat a song, add it to their library, or skip it.
🗓️ The only way to be added to algorithmic playlists is by releasing music at least three weeks in advance, allowing Spotify’s algorithm to analyze early listener data. Being added to these playlists is an automatic process and does not require pitching or any kind of special promotion.
🐰 Rabbit Hole
How Spotify Playlists Work
To learn more about this important industry topic, jump down this friendly rabbit hole! The linked article will open in a new tab, so you won’t lose your place on this page. Learn how Spotify playlists really work, so no one can take advantage of your lack of knowledge!
Boost Collective’s claims that they can manipulate these placements are either a reflection of their ignorance or an outright attempt to mislead musicians.
Careless Execution & Amateurish Marketing
Even beyond their fraudulent operations, Boost Collective’s execution is riddled with sloppy mistakes.
Their marketing materials and advertisements are filled with spelling errors, poor grammar, and contradictory claims — a clear indication of lacking professionalism.
Even their official PDF packets contain glaring typos, which further calls into question their credibility. See photo evidence below to see just how deep this goes.
Let’s Play: Fun With Fact Checks!
(Fun Not Included).
📽️ In the slide show below, we annotated some screen shots from the blog that Boost Collective filibusters on in regularly scheduled manipulation marathons. The text you see on the images (sometimes with emoji’s) that appears to pop off the page is our annotations. Join us, as we step into the fever dream that is The Boost Collective blog….
This is evidence of fraud. He’s buying bots here. 
This photo is doctored. 
Misinformation 
Emotional Immaturity 
Misinformation 
Misinformation 
Possible evidence of fraud. 
Incredibly Deceptive. False 
This is deceptive and false. 
This is deceptive. 
Written by a child, clearly. 
Deceptive. Trying to blame Release Radar for bot spikes. 
Just confusing. 
Emotional Immaturity 
Manipulative & Misleading 
Shows lack of knowledge 
Shows they haven’t been marketing and don’t understand its role 
These are the culprits. 
Misinformation. Few organic playlists are as big as the “low” quantity example 
Misleading 
Misinformation, false 
Misinformation again 
Manipulation (Grooming artists to pass the “scammed by promo” test) 
Misinformation 
Manipulation, deceptive 
Manipulation, misleading 
Misleading, Deceptive 
Revealing. Also, highly misleading 
Emotional immaturity 
misinformation 
Deceptive, evidence of fraud 
Doctored photo, fraud 
Manipulative, misleading 
False. Misleading. Manipulative 
False statement, deceptive 
This was a dorked result. 
Deceptive (the link from the last photo takes you here. No playlists) 
Manipulative 
No industry knowledge 
Just funny lol 
Admits to being a teen
🕵🏼♀️ Scroll the Photos Instead:
📸 See The Photos in Single File Here. Just Click Me.
Below are the same photos from the slide show, just in a different browsing format. To skip this section, click anywhere outside of this column to collapse the drop-down.
Final Verdict: Boost Collective is a Scam.
🧥 Boost Collective is not much of a collective, when it comes down to it. What we are dealing with here is essentially just four, barely-adult boys who are play-acting as marketers with real money. They are victimizing artists, knowingly, for mall money.
Boost Collective is not just ineffective — it’s fraudulent. Their business model relies on deception, artificial streams, fake reviews, and misleading advertising to extract money from independent artists. Let’s review some of their lowest moments before we wrap up.
🎞️ Doctored Photos
Not only are they almost certainly employing bots to get their streams for their playlists, they are also engaging in false advertising, predatory distribution deals, misleading informational campaigns surrounding marketing topics and how Spotify playlists work, and a whole host of other unsavory practices and tactics.
📦 Their Distribution Scam
🐰 There is only one real takeaway here, and that is simply that Boost Collective is a scam. They are aware that what they are doing is fraudulent, and they don’t seem to particularly care.
With so many acts of fraud and deception from these young men, the actual track record here can be tough to follow.
So, allow us to simplify the whole shroud of nonsense surrounding Boost Collective and separate the truth from their web of lies.
🎵 Their Playlist Scam
Boost Collective is a team of (essentially) children, living a theatrical production of adulthood with no experiential reference to draw from, no specialized (or even generalized) knowledge in their chosen field, and no idea what they heck they are talking about 99.9% of the time.
From a business standpoint, they have been operating on investments raised in bad faith, and by victimizing artists, convincing them to part with their money, paying for what end up being botted playlists, non-existent ad campaigns, and the most predatory distribution contract we have ever encountered.
🚩 Lack of Industry Knowledge
By raising money on false premises, and by victimizing unsuspecting indie artists, Boost Collective has been able to grow an entire scam empire, all before they were old enough to legally drink (not that that appears to have stopped them).
Boost Collective likes to talk without filter or fact-check, to teach without any knowledge or education, and to make artists feel like all of their hopes and goals would be hopeless and impossible without them. See an example of this manipulative behavior below.
🎭 Manipulation Tactics
Boost Collective not only preys on indie artists by taking their money, they also write malicious waivers into their service contracts, which are buried under a barrage of unreadable legal jargon, hidden like little landmines and presumably going undiscovered until the ink has already dried.
📑 Fraud-Serving Contracts
Artists under Boost unknowingly sign away their master rights, waive their moral rights, and part with an unspecified portion of their royalties on top of it, which Boost claims the right to change, increase, or altogether keep at any time for any reason, and in perpetuity (forever).
🔏 Right to Ownership
The worst part, to us, is that they are not doing this out of sheer ill-will either. It’s way more upsetting that that. They seem to be doing all of this, just for the walking around money. They all come from good neighborhoods and from the appearances of things, never hurt for money in any real way.
They’re clearly scamming people, just so they can have the extra pocket money to get trashed together and run up huge bar tabs, or spend entire weeks together on lavish vacations to various beach destinations. They’re doing this so they can afford to party they way they want to.
🍼 They Started at 15, Pretending to Be Adults & Operating As Execs.
😳 As a Teenager: Damian Made $50k a Month Scamming People Through Boost Collective
They don’t have the maturity level or the educational background to justify a marketing company, or a distribution firm, let a lone a record label. They can’t write a coherent sentence or complete a cogent thought.
They certainly shouldn’t be trusted with running an ad campaign, or with giving complex career advice, or with anything that involves your money or your music.
📈 Zero Grasp of Basic Marketing
See Boost confusing their ad revenue with their ad cost.
This was posted to their blog, under the premise of teaching other artists how marketing works. It’s really just a thinly veiled attempt to make marketing seem harder and less effective than it really is, hoping that artists will get frustrated and just past Boost to promote them instead.
But this mistake, and countless others like it, was not part of that manipulative deception. This is just what happens when you talk as much as these kids do without knowing the first thing about the topic you’re discussing at such length.
✍🏻 Boost Collective is a trio of arrogant, ignorant kids, playing with real money and victimizing real careers. They’re young and dumb – but far from broke. And you can almost tell by looking at them – they know that they’re scamming people, and they’re not a bit sorry about it.
No Remorse, No Regrets
Evidence of No Remorse:
Jabari Instructs Clients on How to Evade DistroKid’s New Questionnaire – Which is Aimed at Teaching Artists how to Identify Bot Playlists & Scam Marketers.
🧑🏽🏫 Grooming Artists to Help Them Hide Their Playlisting Fraud
Jabari’s Not Sorry
We want to take a second to share an observation with everyone. Of these three insidious children, there is one who seems to have a real potential for mass-scale fraud. Of the Boost boys, Jabari Banza is the one to watch, in particular.
He’s different from the other Boost Collective boys. And not in a good way. They’re all bad – but, Jabari, he’s poised to do bigger, badder things than the rest. He could have used that to make himself a true success story. He has the drive for it. But it doesn’t look like that’s something he’s interested in.
Ronan, I believe would like to follow in Jabari’s footsteps, but is unlikely to make it as far, as he doesn’t have the same drive or ambition that Jabari has. Much like Ronan though, Jabari is decidedly uninformed in his own field.
Obviously, that would normally be a limiting factor for someone attempting to make a business out of it. But, it hasn’t been a limitation for Jabari whatsoever. Unlike the other boys, Jabari is also dangerously ambitious. And even more dangerously uninformed.
I would not be the least bit surprised if, in some not-so-distant future, he went on to become the founder of the next WeWork or Fyre Festival.
He has already begun founding and fundraising for new companies, all based off of the illusion of success he and his friends created around Boost Collective. One lie supports the framework for another lie, until you’re living and banking on a house of cards.
And that’s the future we unfortunately anticipate for Jabari Banza. If he put some of that ambition towards positive, productive enterprises, there’s no telling what kind of legacy he could leave behind.
But instead, Jabari would rather mislead than learn, he’d rather talk than listen, he’d rather run a scam than provide a service, and he’d rather pretend to be an expert than to take the time to actually become one.
Structuring a scam and building a business both take time. Why some choose to spend their time on the former is beyond us. People tend to cheat themselves by going for the shortcuts in life.
🚩 To be fair, all three founding members of Boost Collective have, in their own way, fully adopted the “WeWork” model of fake-it-until-you-make-it, (or at least until you can find people’s money and take it) and have been doing so since they were quite literally children.
They work from falsified credentials, fabricated success stories, and fake reviews on websites like TrustPilot. And they’re not slowing down; quite the opposite. They are looking to expand their empire, with Jabari already going on to found a Web3 company called Northern Labs, and the rest of the gang appears to be hard at work on incorporating a record label under the Boost Collective umbrella.
Jabari Banza:
A Dangerous Ambition Produces New Schemes
👥 The Gang Gets Together For Another Bad Idea:
Summary of Fraudulence
🕵🏼♀️ Character Witness:
See How The Boost Kids Spend Their Money
📸 See the Photo Evidence. Just Click Me.
Below are photos from our research into the characters of the Boost Collective boys. This is primarily done to demonstrate the intent and motive behind scams like Boost Collective’s fraudulent empire. It is meant to portray them as accurately as possible, and as such, all photos here were taken from publicly shared social media accounts. These are the images that they wanted to share with the world, as that is typically the intent behind sharing something online. Take a look at the lives that their victim’s hard-earned money has allowed them to lead, even as teenagers.
To skip this photo section, simply click anywhere outside of this column to collapse the drop down.
The Fraudulent Playlist & Distribution Model
Boost Collective forces artists to use their own distribution platform as a prerequisite for gaining access to their alleged playlist placements. This alone is a red flag, as no legitimate playlisting service requires distribution exclusivity. The reason behind this requirement is clear: it allows them to mask bot-driven streams and avoid liability when Spotify detects artificial activity.
🐰 A reputable distributor, such as DistroKid or TuneCore, operates independently of promotional services and actively penalizes artificial streaming activity, often removing tracks that trigger fraud detection systems. This is a conflict of interest.
The above photo from their blog shows them making a claim about bots coming from DistroKid, which makes no sense, because there are no bots on DistroKid, as it’s a distribution company, meaning it is just third party service that syndicates music from the artist to a streaming platform. It’s a digital limbo between playable music and packaged file data – so, naturally, there can be no bots there.
Bots happen on the streaming platforms (like Spotify), not on the Distribution platform. Boost already had a distribution company at the time that they wrote this, so why they are so confused on this matter is a real head-scratcher. It’s either part of their elaborate manipulation tactics or it’s part of their willful ignorance and unwillingness to Google even one single thing before presenting it as fact.
By handling distribution in-house, Boost Collective absorbs the financial consequences while ensuring artists are left vulnerable to penalties, including music removal and account suspensions.
Tallying Up the Crimes:
🕵🏼♀️ PLAYING THE HITS!
All Photos Evidencing Fraudulence.
(Drop-Down, Below).
📸 A Re-Run of Photos Evidencing Fraud
Below are some of the photos pertaining to Boost Collective’s fraudulent acts and unsavory business practices.
To skip this section, just click anywhere outside of this column to collapse the drop-down menu.
Is This a Playlist Scam?
Yes. But it’s goes much deeper than that. In terms of the bot playlist part of this scam, that’s just a small piece of this horrible puzzle. This is also a distribution scam, a rights and ownership scam, a marketing scam, and likely an investment or Ponzi Scheme on some level.
The counts of fraud are impossible to tally, be we have found dozens, sometimes just while attempting to research something innocuous within their web of lies. Without even looking for any wrongdoing, it was hard to take even a single step in their world without stumbling over an act of fraud or two.
The playlists are just a means to end for Boost Collective’s greater scams at play, though the damage from this is obviously very real. Many of the playlists they advertise as part of their package no longer exist, and those that do often feature only a handful of tracks — suggesting that their playlisting program is largely a facade designed to deceive customers.
Final Analysis:
How the Scam Works
Boost Collective is not just a scam — it is an engineered fraud ecosystem designed to extract revenue from artists in a self-sustaining feedback loop of deception. At its core, Boost has created a circular revenue machine in which artists are stripped of their rights, their earnings are funneled into Boost’s control, and fake streams generate revenue that continuously fuels the scam.
🐰 At the center of this fraud is Boost’s predatory distribution deal, which removes master rights from artists, granting Boost legal control over the music.
This allows them to monetize the very songs they claim to promote, directing all revenue through their own system. Since they control both the distribution and marketing, they don’t need to deliver results — they only need to maintain the illusion that they are promoting music.
The fraud deepens with Boost’s bot-driven playlists, where artists’ songs are placed on artificial streaming networks to generate fake engagement. This is where the cycle becomes insidious: since Boost is also the distributor, they have no incentive to remove the music even if Spotify detects bot streams.
Instead of removing the track or being penalized as an external playlist curator, Boost simply pays Spotify’s $10-per-track penalty for fraudulent streams — a tiny price compared to the revenue they extract. The artist, meanwhile, is left with an account flagged for artificial streaming and a track that will never see organic algorithmic growth.
🔁 This creates a closed-loop revenue system in which Boost makes money at every stage:
- 💸 Artists pay for playlist promotion.
- 📑 Boost distributes the music and retains rights.
- 🤖 Boost places the track on botted playlists.
- 💰 Fake streams generate revenue. Boost collects.
- 🚩 Spotify flags the streams, but Boost, as the distributor, simply pays a fine instead of facing serious repercussions.
- 🔏 Boost continues monetizing the song indefinitely, while the artist remains locked in the system, unable to leave due to their restrictive contract.
This is not just deceptive marketing — it is a calculated fraud designed to trap artists into a revenue stream that only benefits Boost.
The Fraudulent Founders & Their Web of Lies
Adding another layer of deception, Boost Collective was founded by teenagers with no business experience, no higher education, and no industry knowledge — but they actively misrepresented themselves as experts while taking thousands from artists.
- Jabari Banza falsely claimed to have graduated with a BA in 2019, but was caught attending a campus party at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2021 — two years after his supposed graduation date. All of the boys lie about their age, which would be maybe forgivable if there wasn’t so much money and people’s career’s on the line.
- Ronan Mullins claimed to have attended high school from 2015 to 2019, yet records show he was still in secondary school from 2016 to 2020. This means that he was 16 years old when he started taking clients’ money while falsely presenting himself as an experienced executive.
- Damian Barbu publicly claimed to be making $50,000 a month between the ages of 16 and 18 by operating Boost Collective. This is not a hero of hustle culture. This is a scammer that started young and aimed high. Music is free to consume. Typically there is not that kind of money in this industry, no matter what side of it you work for. Scams make quick cash like that. Typically, legitimate businesses in this space take time to grow to that level of financial return. And often never do.
- Boost’s blog — a fever dream of misinformation — was written to manipulate artists into believing success was impossible without them. They exaggerated barriers, fabricated statistics, and misrepresented basic industry concepts to convince artists they needed Boost’s services.
This level of dishonesty goes beyond exaggerated marketing — it is outright fraud.
The Moral Rights Waiver: The Most Disturbing Clause
Among all the exploitative contract terms Boost forces upon artists, one stands out as particularly sinister: the requirement that artists waive their moral rights.
In the music industry, moral rights protect an artist’s ability to control how their work is used, modified, or represented. No legitimate distributor demands that an artist permanently surrender control over their own music.
This clause alone is one of the biggest red flags in Boost’s scam — it allows them to license, alter, or repurpose an artist’s music however they see fit, without permission or compensation.
This clause is unheard of in standard distribution contracts, making it clear that Boost never intended to act as a legitimate music service.
Lavish Spending & Complete Lack of Ethics
While artists lose their money, Boost’s founders live lavishly off their victims’ payments.
- They have been spotted on expensive vacations, partying in nightclubs, and spending excessively — all while failing to provide legitimate services to their clients.
- Instead of reinvesting revenue into artist marketing, they fund their own lifestyles — proving that they never intended to build a real business.
This is not just financial mismanagement — it’s basically theft.
Conclusion: Boost Collective is a Calculated Scam
From fake playlists to contract manipulation, forced revenue cycling, and fraudulent credentials, Boost Collective is a scam in every sense of the word.
They have stolen from artists, lied about their qualifications, abused the legal system to silence legitimate businesses, and built an ecosystem where every dollar flows back into their own pockets.
This is not incompetence. This is not a misunderstanding. This is fraud. Please avoid Boost Collective at all costs.
💛 Now Offering Free Victim’s Assistance Services
If you have been scammed by Boost Collective, we can help. We provide free Victim’s Assistance services, offering individual advice from the MSA team.
We will create a personalized plan based on your situation, including resources to help you recover lost funds and important details about the scammers for legal actions or police reports. If you report to the police, inform them they can contact us for complete case files, as can any lawyer or legal official.
We provide complete dox files but we don’t publish them publicly, due to it being a somewhat morally-questionable thing to do. Our focus is assisting victims and their legal teams, which we believe helps artists recover from scams.
🐰 We write police reports, connect victims with helpful government agencies, and guide victims through reclaiming losses and moving on from the experience.
MSA here, reminding you that you got this, and we’ve got your back!
🐰 Contact Us For Victim’s Assistance:
Clicking the “I Need Help” button will automatically load your default email client, with a pre-addressed email already filled out and ready to send to us. We even filled out some of the email body text for you, just so you know what we need to know from you. Don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re here to help.
Stay in the loop,
– Music Scam Alert Staff
don’t get duped.
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