Kendrick Lamar, SZA, and Doechii are three TDE-affiliated artists who have faced botting allegations from some hip-hop corners, especially in the aftermath of Kendrick's Drake battle. While on The Joe Budden Podcast, the label's president Terrence "Punch" Henderson Jr. addressed these claims when asked about then by Budden.
"I ain't got nothing to say about it," he expressed, as caught by Kurrco on Twitter. "We don't bot. Absolutely not. I've never." Henderson said he's heard of people in the industry using bots, doesn't know where to get them, doesn't know how much they cost, doesn't know if people sell bundles of bots, but understands how they could be beneficial.
"We've been seeing it since MySpace," he added when Joe asked if he sees how numbers-focused artists and labels would want to "juice their numbers up." "I used to run the follower account up, the listening account, they would run it all the way up. But our whole thing was, if we do that, how are we going to know who the actual fan is? We'd do a show, don't nobody show up, 'cause it was all fake. So we purposely chose not to do that."
The pod then posited artists and labels like the TDE camp could be big enough to sustain success in real life, thus leading to their alleged use of bots not mattering as much as extra numbers. "Where would they find the bots? It might be genius," Budden posited. But Emanny questioned what the point of bots would be in the first place if this was the case.
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TDE's Punch On The Joe Budden Podcast
Ice brought up a head-to-head hypothetical between two big artists that might sway in one's favor thanks to extra bots. "If that's your aim, yeah, I can see that," Punch remarked. "But we've never been based on actual numbers. Our true metric is seeing people in them seats at the show." He also affirmed how they conditioned their fanbase to support monetarily and in person early on.
TDE's Punch's JBP appearance also saw him deny rumors that he was paying Joe Budden to favor K.Dot, rumors Budden also denied. We'll see if he has anything else to say about what's going on with TDE these days.
