Even though the charts don’t matter some artists will do anything to get to the top of them. Even if it means buying their own CD.

A group of DJs allegedly used stolen credit cards to buy their own songs on iTunes and Amazon, boosting their chart ratings and netting then nearly £200,000 in royalties.

The nine musicians are believed to have provided 19 songs, described by police as of ‘indeterminate quality’, to a distribution company which uploaded them to the music websites.

They then used 1,500 stolen or cloned US and British credit cards to buy almost £500,000-worth of the songs. [metro.co.uk]

Six men and three women were arrested at addresses in London, Birmingham, Kent and Wolverhampton. The group allegedly paid an annual £18-per-album fee to music distribution service Tunecore to get their albums uploaded onto the sites before downloading them for £6 each. All nine are in custody at police stations in London and the Midlands on suspicion of conspiracy to commit fraud and money laundering.