Its most prominent playlists have serious cultural power. Its platform has more than 4 billion playlists, 3,000 of which are owned by Spotify, curated by a mix of algorithms and editors. In 2017, 68 percent of all listening on Spotify was from a company or user playlist, according to the company’s 2018 Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
But Spotify dominates the conversation both because of its market power and its immensely popular playlists.
Today, three services make up two-thirds of the streaming economy: Spotify, which has an estimated 32 percent of the market, Apple Music (18 percent), and Amazon Music (14 percent). To help listeners find their way in the endless aisles of digital music, streaming providers created playlists - but this new way of listening has created unintended consequences for artists and songwriters. Keller puts this volume in perspective: “If you took all of the premium music released on a digital storefront right now, and tried to jam it into a record store, it’d need to be a Home Depot.” “Streaming is a great way to make an artist faceless” For artists, as the volume of new music releases increases, it’s becoming more difficult to be heard. In 2019, 40,000 songs were uploaded daily to Spotify, according to Music Business Worldwide in 2021, that number has grown to 60,000. In 2020, there were more songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 than any year since the 1960s, the last decade when singles, and not albums, drove the recording industry. There’s more competition on the charts than ever. And though appearances on Spotify playlists like Mood Booster, Happy This!, Warm Fuzzy Feeling, Chill Hits, and Alone Again helped generate billions of streams for the song and a number of follow-up singles, Arthur has yet to land another Top 40 hit.
It’s a mid-tempo acoustic ballad with a gentle hip-hop groove that fits equally well on pop radio as it does in alternative and adult contemporary formats. He cites James Arthur, whose song “Say You Won’t Let Go” reached No. “The song,” Keller says, “becomes bigger than the artist.” His roster has written for artists including BTS, Ariana Grande, and Gwen Stefani - at one point in 2019, 10 of the songs on top 40 were written or produced by Milk & Honey talent. “Streaming is a great way to make an artist faceless,” says Lucas Keller, the CEO of the entertainment management company Milk & Honey, which manages some of the biggest producers and songwriters working today. That’s because like so many other viral hits, the song, not the artist, became the asset. For an artist like Daniels, streaming both gave him the opportunity to break out from obscurity and made it exponentially more difficult to have a follow-up hit. It also presents a paradox of choice: What should you listen to when you can hear nearly any song that’s ever been recorded? With more and more songs released by more and more musicians on more and more platforms - and less emphasis on traditional media to tell listeners what to like - the sprawl of streaming has upended what it means to be a pop star. It’s no secret that streaming has changed everything, providing unfettered access to the largest catalog of music in human history. Success in the music industry used to rely on radio plays and premium retail “endcap” placements (where stores like Best Buy gave album releases prime real estate). Daniels has yet to come close to replicating the accomplishment of “Falling.” 77 on Billboard, left the charts in 5 weeks and had just 10 percent of the streams that “Falling” achieved on Spotify. Then Daniel attempted a star-studded follow-up, ”Past Life,” featuring Selena Gomez and produced by Finneas. It was streamed more than a billion times on Spotify, where it’s featured on prominent playlists like “Chill Hits,” “Beast Mode,” and “Top Gaming Hits.” The social media hype led to traditional media success: The song spent 38 weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100, peaking at 17. First, it was picked up by influencers on Instagram, then it became a TikTok meme featured in more than 3 million videos. Its tame take on emo-rap couldn’t hold a candle to the darker more confessional acts like Lil Uzi Vert and Juice WRLD, who pioneered the sound.īut two years later, “Falling” blew up, thanks to the internet. In 2018, Trevor Daniel released the song “Falling” to little fanfare.
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