Folk singer’s arrest increases popularity of his ‘defamatory’ songs

Chennai: A week after Chennai city cyber sleuths suo motu arrested folk singer Kovan for defamatory online songs against chief minister J Jayalalithaa and booked him for sedition, demand for his videos on youtube and vinavu.com touched new heights.

Two songs - shut down Tasmac (moodu Tasmac moodu) and Liquor in every village (Oorukku oru sarayam) – which had very insignificant hits till a week ago were in much demand since last Friday, the day cyber sleuths arrested the folk singer. As per youtube statistics, hits for the second song, published in October 1 this year, was almost flat till October 30. But it reached the highest point with 2.33 lakh views during the last 7 days.

“The police arrest and subsequent media coverage on Kovan and his songs had actually created a lot of buzz in the web. Kovan was actually not a very popular singer in the state. But the cops made him and his songs popular, according to the youtube data,” said an online analyst.

The police are also aware of the new online popularity for the arrested man. “People are curious about his songs. So it is natural for people to check it online. Just because more and more people watching his songs, we are not going to be soft on him,” a city police officer said.

The other song moodu Tasmac moodu too attracted lot of attention. Though it was seen by very few people after it was uploaded in August, there was a sudden flood of online visitors who wanted to watch the video since last Friday and 1.19 lakh people had watched the song till now.

The same song with English subtitle too had over 15,000 hits in four days. In cases of both the songs 90 per cent people had given thumbs up while only 10 percent disliked the lyrics.

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