Yesterday, LA electronic duo YACHT, comprised of creative and romantic partners Jona Bechtolt and Claire Evans, took to their official Facebook page to reveal that a sex tape they’d made had been leaked online by a “morally abject person”.

Following an outpouring of support from fans, the band issued a subsequent statement thanking fans and announcing their decision to legally sell the video through their own website “Louis CK style”, charging fans AUD$7 each.

“We have always operated under the principle of doing our best to maintain dignity and a commitment to openness and truth, both on stage and off,” the pair wrote in their statement. Except, the whole thing was an elaborate hoax staged by the band.

The pair’s initial statement had been met with some skepticism from fans, but most had taken the band at their word, including media outlets like Pitchfork, the FADER, Vulture, Exclaim, and Tone Deaf, reporting on the band’s bold decision to take control of an often helpless situation.

Jezebel and Thump were among the first outlets to suggest that the whole thing may simply be a PR stunt, after several fans who attempted to purchase the video through YACHT’s specially created website resulted in errors and claims of server overload.

Jezebel reportedly received a tip that the band’s sex tape story was a hoax, whilst Thump noted that the only people who claimed to have actually seen the video were in fact celebrity friends of the band, such as filmmaker Miranda July.

Bechtolt and Evans have since released a statement in which they admit to “creat[ing] a story that was quickly revealed as fiction by the internet” and insist they didn’t expect the outpouring of support they received, despite previously thanking fans for that very support.

The statement goes on to claim that nobody who attempted to purchase the video had their credit card charged and that the ‘hoax’ was simply a viral art project intended to play with “science fiction, the attention economy, clickbait journalism, and celebrity sex tapes”.

“We never make light of victims of any form of sexual abuse,” they continued. “Frankly, it’s disturbing to us that press outlets could make the leap from ‘celebrity sex tape,’ which is the cultural trope this project explicitly references, to ‘revenge porn,’ which is unfunny, disgusting, morally repugnant, and completely unrelated.”

But instead of receiving “interest, skepticism, and laughter”, the plan seems to have backfired on Bechtolt and Evans, who have been inundated with furious comments from former fans on their official Facebook page. “Never listening to your music again,” one commenter wrote.

The issue most fans are having, it seems, is that YACHT didn’t play a trick on the media like Father John Misty did when he created a fanciful story about Lou Reed’s ghost visiting him and ordering him to take down his covers of Taylor Swift.

Instead, they convinced their own fans that the private lives of people they looked up to and respected had been invaded, perhaps even forcing some to relive their own traumatic experiences, and capitalised on their sympathies for the purpose of PR.

There’s a difference between tricking people into attending a fake Limp Bizkit concert at a gas station and playing on their emotions by convincing them you’re going through a very plausible and horrifying invasion of privacy.

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Perhaps some, like Thump, might view the situation as “a biting commentary on the state of music journalism, which turns sex tapes into #content without blinking”, but the issue is that outlets like Pitchfork, the FADER, Vulture, etc didn’t take a leaked sex tape and turn it into content.

Would they have? Probably, but in this case the story was focused on the way two people who’d been robbed of their agency found a way to make the best of a crappy situation. As The Verge notes, the band’s crime was in underestimating the sympathy of the internet.

It’s little wonder their publicist thought the whole thing was a bad idea and their “epic project”, as they described it in an email sent to select media outlets back in April, may have just been an epic swing and a miss.

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