Sakis Gouzonis?

[hwex9000]

I've just noticed that there's a Greek electronic music composer named Sakis Gouzonis who's suddenly, somehow, exploded in popularity on the BEA charts within the last couple of months. He now has thirteen albums in the all-time top 10,000, including one (New Earth) that's currently at #2192. None of these albums appears on more than 9 charts, and most are on only 2 or 3. This seems a little... well, I'll just say it seems odd.

[MadhattanJack]

Well, let's not all jump to conclusions and assume that BEA members openthegates, musicawareness, BeatsPerMinute, and BestMusicAlbums are all the same person just because they started their accounts about 3 weeks ago and within a few days of each other, all have exactly the same taste in music, and all have rated Sakis' New Earth album as the Greatest Album of All Time. Nor should we all assume that the fact that all 17 of Sakis' free-to-download albums have reviews on Discogs that read as if they were written by the same person (or AI) but were posted by different user accounts who all joined Discogs within the last 4 months (and have shown no other appreciable activity there) means that something "fishy" is going on.

I mean, sure, I'm jumping to those conclusions, but that doesn't mean we all have to.


Sakis!

[II]

BEA's community is quite small. Usually many of the members here rate music mostly from US, UK and a bit more from other English-speaking countries. So artists from different countries get way less points than the other artists I mentioned before, unless the artist has a wider appeal, for example: Vangelis is known globally so has about 3,169 points, however, the artist entry a spot below Vangelis in BEA's top artists from Greece: Aphrodite's Child, has only a rank score of 973 points, and you can see most of the Greek artist entries have less than 100 points. You can see it happens quite many times with many other countries on BEA.

For example: When you check Ukraine's top artists, you see Okean Elzy in the top spot, and I've seen their albums appear occasionally in two members' charts: Larcx13 & Nightprowler. Same goes for Boombox which is the top 4th Ukrainian artist because they are along with Okean Elzy his favorite Ukrainian artists and he explicitly said not long ago he likes music from his home country, especially these two artists.

Personally, I listened to Supersymetriya by Okean Elzy and I finished the album, but I could not be interested enough to listen the album for a 2nd time, and I threw off Boombox quickly since Hip-Hop is one of the genres I'm mostly not that into, and imo only a few can master it (I'm so sorry, Larcx13 ), but eventually, due to Ukraine's minimal amount of artist entries on BEA, I discovered Ihor Cymbrovskyj and his only album which has only 4 points, and I liked some of its tracks, mostly because the reverberated piano melodies sounds really nice to me.

I also discovered Avial, which is the top 10th artist entry from India because the user Roal rated their only album as his 39th favorite album of all time in his chart, making the album have 56 additional points. Their sound is a combination of Alternative Metal + Malayalam folk music, which sound pretty cool!

I've discovered many artists from many countries that way, so it isn't that bad, right? Well, all of the examples I've given were as a result of a tiny amount of individual BEA users who caused them, but in the case of Sakis Gouzonis, it does seem very suspicious ...
Albums by him appear in several "all-time charts" like from 4 to 14 times... Even on RateYourMusic it seems suspicious: most of his albums have a rating of more than 4 points which is extremely rare, and I believe you can that the small amount of RYM users who rate them are about the same users who put them in their charts, write reviews in each release etc. and the recent users were created on late August - early September this year, which is about the same time some the users who've rated Gouzonis's music were created on BEA. In addition, if you compare his top songs on RYM and on BEA, the lists are quite similar! Which means the users on BEA and on RYM who rated the tracks may be the same people with the same opinions!
The user GreekElectronica from RYM was created in 2011, but they seem they are still active, even today, and they have only rated all 17 albums by Gouzonis, and rated them all 5 stars. Most of the albums were rated on August 29th 2015, which is the same day Gouzonis's artist entry on BEA along all his albums which were released prior that date were created on that day by a user called topinstrumental, and we can take a look at their profile and see they are from Greece and like Gouzonis! that user has uploaded all album entries of Gouzonis's albums! And they rated all of his albums 100/100! Perhaps GreekElectronica and Topinstrumental are the same person, and could be Sakis Gouzonis himself! He could be also superbmusic from AlbumofTheYear...

If there has been a vote manipulation, then on RYM it is obviously not as effective as on BEA, because the chart system can instantly give albums many points in the rank score, and there are way less users who rate music on BEA in comparison with RYM, and because of that, Gouzonis now has a bit more points than Vangelis and is the 502th top rated artist on BEA!

Sakis Gouzonis's music is available on his website, but his music barely has views on YouTube, and not that much uploads, so this is very strange...

I listened to his album New Heart, and it's melodic electronic instrumental music that sounds like something from the 80s-90s. Some music from the Demoscene in the late 90s sound kinda similar. The compositions are not too complex but they do sound pretty much beautiful. Track 3 "Elohim" has given me Nobuo Uemtasu vibes, which is very interesting. Instrumental music is well-received in Greece (at least from what I've observed so far). I've seen albums by Manos Hadjidakis and Mikis Theodorakis appear in the top spots of greatest Greek albums of all time according to Greek people.

You know, the funniest thing is that most of my favorite music is instrumental, and it's mostly related to video game music and its composers and/or arrangers, so some of it was/is created in computers, for example: several music I listen to from time to time are FM Synthesized, which is all music created for the Sega Mega Drive, PC-98 and other Japanese hardware from the 90s which have Yamaha FM chips. I also listen to Demoscene music a bit, but the stuff from Japan are phenomenal because of the 80s emerging in popularity Japanese Jazz Fusion influences. So Sakis Gouzonis could ironically be my favorite Greek artist! But I'll have to listen more of his music in order to have a more solid opinion.

[albummaster]

[II]

[albummaster]

Thanks, most of these accounts now banned with the exception of a few that didn't share some of the underlying metadata. (Need to be careful not to be too heavy handed as don't want people penalised unfairly).

[hwex9000]

Thanks, AM. How long before the lists are refreshed accordingly to reflect this?

[albummaster]

[hwex9000]

[albummaster]