The competition at this year’s Billboard Music Awards is fierce, with artists from around the globe competing for the coveted golden mic. Predicting what artists will take home marquee awards like Top New Artist and Top Group takes a combination of skill, knowledge, and a little bit of luck, three ingredients that can win you bragging rights as the ultimate arbiter of the music scene. VersusGame wants to reward you with something even better if you can guess the winners on May 23rd: Money.
VersusGame is a mobile gaming app that rewards you for your knowledge of everything from pop culture to sports to entertainment and food. Playing is simple: You download the app to your phone, buy some credits, find a game, and start predicting to win. There are categories to fit anyone’s interest, from guessing who a celebrity’s favorite rapper is to guessing when a surprise album will drop. Calling something correctly will net you VersusGame coins that you can cash out for real money. The mobile gaming company has already given away $16M to players over the last two years, and are giving one lucky fan $1M during the Billboard Music Awards on May 23rd.
To do that, VersusGame is partnering with influencers and artists like Cameron Dallas, Josh Richards, Taylor Caniff, Jack J (JVCK), and Ktlyn. Each of them will be posting their own game for fans in the days leading up to the BMAs, and include questions like “Who will be the Top Male Artist?” and “Who will be the Top Rap Artist?” On Sunday morning, Josh Richards will randomly pick three finalists from the pool of VersusGame players who will be given a set of 10 award predictions. Guess all of them right, and one winner will have a shot at $1M in cash.
It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to put your music and pop culture knowledge to the test. Predicting the artists walking home with a trophy from the Billboard Music Awards has always been about bragging rights. Now those bragging rights come with cash.
NEWS
No matter what you thought of the Kendrick Lamar and Drake battle, there was only one undisputed winner by the end of it all: the reaction community in the worlds of streaming and YouTube. Your favorite content creators broke down the bars, reacted to all the most shocking moments, and helped this showdown become one of hip-hop's most culturally significant and resonant moments in a long time... For better or worse. See, the battle's technically not over yet, but only because the 6ix God's idea of victory is clearly quite different. In his federal defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group – his label – for releasing K.Dot's "Not Like Us," he named various content creators who allegedly helped boost the track's widespread popularity and, as a result, its supposedly defamatory nature.
Furthermore, the specific allegation that Drake brings up in this highly controversial lawsuit is that UMG "whitelisted" copyright claims for YouTubers, streamers, etc. concerning "Not Like Us." This means that they would be able to monetize their content without facing a copyright claim from UMG over "Not Like Us," and this isn't really an allegation because various creators have backed this up. But a few important (alleged) caveats that people are talking about online need to be clear. First, "whitelisting" supposedly happens on behalf of a record label behind a song like the West Coast banger, and UMG is instead the distributor of that track. Secondly, as rapper and online personality ScruFaceJean brings up as seen in the post below, tracks like "Push Ups" were also "whitelisted" by its team.
Along with Jean, many other of your favorite content creators spoke out against this Drake lawsuit. Zias! and B.Lou, for example, spoke with their lawyer about the possibility of countersuing for emotional distress, as they found the Toronto superstar's accusations and his implication of them very disturbing and misguided. NoLifeShaq also dragged The Boy through the mud, calling him "soft" and positing that, whether "whitelisting" happened or not, they would react to "Not Like Us" accordingly as they did to his own tracks.
In addition, it's important to bring up that many others fans have pointed to how Drake excitedly used streamers to generate hype and reaction clips for his own diss tracks against Kendrick Lamar. The most direct example is with Kai Cenat, whom he texted to "stay on stream" before dropping "Family Matters." Ironically, the Twitch giant appears in this clowned-upon defamation lawsuit as an example of what the OVO mogul's accusations and implications are. And one more thing: there is no direct link between monetization and algorithmic boosting on sites like YouTube. With all this in mind, content creators seem to feel almost insulted at the idea that they only reacted to the two biggest rappers in the world beefing with each other because one of them would allow them to make money. If Drizzy knew the first thing about the reaction community, maybe he wouldn't have included this...
