THRIVING IN THE STREAM
A look at who is benefiting from modern music technology
Andrew Bazzi was an anonymous 20-year-old from Dearborn, Mich., until success came via streaming.
Once Bazzi’s song Mine hit streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music, it took off. In prestreaming days, it took months for a song to become a hit. And for a quirky singer-songwriter like Bazzi, it might never have happened at all. But thanks to his streaming success, Bazzi’s songs have been heard more than a quarter of a billion times, and he has a major-label deal and a Billboard hit.
Because streaming sites rely on fan-driven metrics, “real artists have actual shots at being successful,” Bazzi says. “Back in the day, you could’ve been the most talented dude with the best songs, but if the gatekeepers didn’t like you, you weren’t going anywhere. Streaming has allowed people to come out, literally.”
Streaming services are the dominant way for fans to consume music, and industry leader Spotify began trading on the New York Stock Exchange with an initial valuation of nearly US$30 billion. The success of streaming has upended a lot of conventional wisdom in the music industry: the need for physical product, the dominance of superstars, the boundaries between genres and between old and new music.
Thanks to streaming, old-fashioned superstars are brought down to earth, bedroom musicians such as Bazzi are celebrities and there’s a new ecosystem of winners and losers.
WINNER: HIP HOP
Streaming services are a beast that needs constant feeding. Younger hip-hop artists have adjusted to its demands more quickly than artists from other genres. At the heart of rap’s streaming dominance is something more ephemeral: Some songs just stream better than others, for reasons that no one can really explain yet. Hip hop streams better than other types of mainstream music, and trap music streams better than other types of hip hop.
“There used to be this formula in hip hop,” says Carl Chery, head of artist curation at Apple Music. “You make a song about a girl, with an R&B -friendly beat and an R&B hook, it was more likely to get on the radio. Now, it doesn’t matter . ... When you have a good song with a trap beat, it’s more likely to stream faster than anything else.”
WINNER: LATIN POP
Latin music fans are early digital adopters who were underserved by Top 40 radio, until the Luis Fonsi/ Daddy Yankee behemoth Despacito changed everything. The first Spanish-language song to hit one billion listens on Spotify, it helped unleash a wave of reggaeton and Latin trap streaming hits. Last year, Latin music consumption was up 110 per cent on Spotify.
“Radio programmers say, ‘We can’t put Despacito on the radio because it has Spanish lyrics. That can’t be on a Top 40 station,’” Knopper says. “On Spotify, there’s no filter like that, and suddenly Despacito becomes huge and ra- dio can’t ignore it, and there’s this snowball effect.”
WINNER: HEAVY METAL
Back in 2015, when Spotify compiled a list of the world’s most loyal music fans, broken down by genre, metal fans were No. 1. (Blues fans were the least loyal.) Metal fans tend to strongly self-identify as metal fans. They listen to whole albums, spend outsized amounts of time listening online and seek out music from revered elders, gateway bands such as Metallica and Slipknot.
LOSER: ROCK
If heavy metal’s popularity on streaming services reflects its growing cultural cachet in the broader world, the opposite is true of rock. “I don’t think rock is exciting at all right now,” Bob Lugowe, marketing director at Relapse Records, says. “A lot of these big rock artists like Shinedown or Seether or Breaking Benjamin, they ’re not cool. That’s just how it is, there’s a stigma attached to them, almost. They’re red-state rock.”
Indie and alternative rock is also in the doldrums. When Spotify released a list of its most popular rock bands last year, it skewed toward millennial-friendly, EDMinfluenced acts such as Twenty One Pilots and Imagine Dragons, shutting out bands such as Radiohead and Arcade Fire.
LOSER: COUNTRY
Country songs often don’t do well on streaming services unless radio has broken them first.
Country artists account for only about 5.6 per cent of all streams — they account for about twice that much when it comes to the sales market — though that number is growing, thanks in part to younger, stream-friendly stars such as Kane Brown and Sam Hunt. Last September, Randy Goodman, the chairman and CEO of Sony Music Nashville, delivered a speech to country-music insiders about the growing power of streaming. Its message: Come to Jesus, Nashville.
“We either adopt or we die,” said Goodman. Country fans must learn not to fear the new world.
LOSER: POP
Pop is still one of the top streaming genres, though it consistently lags behind rap. While the rise of streaming has brought a new energy and a sense of open artistic possibilities to Latin music and hip-hop, pop seems diminished, its hitmakers boxed in by the constraints of writing a song that will stream.
“They’re very challenged with streaming, because people just want to get to the hooks quicker,” says Arjan Timmermans, head of pop programming at Apple Music. “A long intro just doesn’t work that well. People want to get right to whatever is the catchy element of the song. Soon enough all of the pop is going to sound the same. You already kind of see that, you can tell what’s a streaming song and what is not.”