There are many less-than-legitimate services that allow you to purchase fake views on YouTube along with a host of other internet measures of popularity. It turns out that the largest labels in music used similar services for their videos, including those of many household name artists like Beyonce and Justin Bieber to the tune of 1 billion views for UMG and 850 million views for Sony.

YouTube has caught and eliminated these dishonest actions only months after announcing its pay-per-view strategy, where these billions of views could translate directly to income for major content creators.

Though UMG and Sony are the biggest offenders, many other labels have been affected as well. This indicated the willingness of major labels to falsify its popularity to Google’s streaming video platform. This is likely to only grow in importance, as a recent Nielsen study shows that almost two-thirds of teens under 18 use YouTube as their primary method of listening to music. 44% of adults also use the service to listen to music, and the big label’s artists create the vast majority of the most popular music videos.