JIM CARROLLon music

Is your favourite pop star dipping into the social media black market?

There are several possible reasons why a pop act or any other social media user for that matter could suddenly see a huge surge in Twitter followers.

For instance, thousands of people may decide to follow a person on the back of some news story or event. No doubt, the numbers following Irish Olympic athletes grew rapidly in the past fortnight.

In some cases, though, the rise in followers is down to that person engaging in the murky trade of buying Twitter followers. There are sites where payment of $14 will add 1,000 fake followers to your name and allow you to pass yourself off as a Twitter boss.

It will strike many as sheer stupidity that someone will go to the trouble of spending money acquiring fake followers. But in the world of social media, where appearance often counts more than substance, there are many who believe that more followers equates to more fame and status and thus they'll go to ridiculous lengths to acquire fake followers.

For those looking to bust the fakers, StatusPeople's Fake Follower is a new web app tool which calculates what percentage of a user's followers are fakes. While most Twitter accounts have a small percentage of fake followers thanks to spam bots at large – 4 per cent of The Ticket's @thetwicket followers are fakes, for instance – there are others with much higher percentages.

Fast Company and blogger Zach Bussey recently put a couple of high-profile Twitter users, ones who have gained unusually huge numbers of followers in a short space of time, to the test. They discovered several Twitter users with large numbers of followers to their credit were actually being followed by up to 80 per cent fakes. Very much a case of caveat emptor.

New music

Frank + Derol

Barely Love You Too is what has turned us onto Los Angeles duo Codi Caraco and Brandi Cyrus (yep, she hails from that Cyrus clan). If the duo come up with more sweet, dreamy sassy pop and minimalist hooks like this, the folks at Interscope who have invested big bucks in them will be happy out.

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Soak

Derry 16-year-old Bridie Monds-Watson was one of the acts that received positive word-of-mouth response from an appearance at the recent Glasgowbury festival. We like the charming, simple, melodic folky hooks of her songs (especially Trains and Sea Creatures with their blurs of John Martyn and Bon Iver), and her strong, distinctive voice is destined to hush rooms.

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Teen

Formerly of Here We Go Magic, Teeny Lieberson has now joined forces with her sisters Katherine and Lizzie, plus Jane Herships from Spider, for some Teen action. First tracks from the group such as Electric are heady and promising, all pulsating pop drama and winning psychedelics. Teen’s Sonic Boom-produced debut album In Limbo is due later in the year on Carpark.

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