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Miley Cyrus can buy herself flowers — 1 billion of them, to be exact. On Thursday (May 4), the pop star’s anthemic hit “Flowers” broke yet another record by becoming the quickest song to reach 1 billion streams in Spotify history.
The onetime Hannah Montana star took to social media in conjunction with the streamer to celebrate the 10-figure benchmark, writing, “Some Flowers never fade,” and adding, “Thanks to all the fans” below the graphic of the singer emblazoned with “Billions Club” in front of her.
Fans deluged the comments section of the post with congratulations for their queen. One follower wrote, “Miley you deserve this and more. It’s been 10 years since I became your fan and it makes me proud to see you are still relevant.” Another gave a knowing nod to Star Wars Day, writing, “May the 4th be with her.” A third clamored for the singer to hit the road in support of her latest studio album Endless Summer Vacation, declaring in all caps, “NOW WE NEED THE TOUR.”
“Flowers” hit the billion-stream milestone in a record 112 days since its release on Jan. 12 as the lead single from Endless Summer Vacation. Since then, it’s spent eight nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped Billboard‘s Global charts for even longer at 12 weeks on the Global 200 and 13 on the Global Excl. US tally.
The song has also broken record after record on its journey to the Billions Club — particularly outdoing itself by becoming the most-streamed song in a single week for two consecutive weeks and earning a rare hat trick by simultaneously topping Billboard‘s Pop Airplay, Adult Pop Airplay and Adult Contemporary charts.
Check out Cyrus and Spotify’s celebratory announcement below.
Nir Zicherman, the executive overseeing Spotify’s audiobooks expansion, is leaving the company at the start of October after more than four years as an executive at the audio giant.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Zicherman — currently the the vp and global head of audiobooks at Spotify — said he is departing to return to his “entrepreneurial roots with a new project in the startup space.” Zicherman first joined Spotify in 2019 after the company acquired Anchor, the podcasting platform that Zicherman co-founded with Michael Mignano, as part of Spotify’s podcast product division. He was later tapped to oversee Spotify’s growing audiobooks business, which formally launched last September with an à la carte model but has faced setbacks in user adoption in part due to Apple’s App Store policies around in-app purchases.
“After a total of 9 years working across Spotify and Anchor, I’ve decided that it’s time for the next chapter in my career,” Zicherman, whose last day is Sept. 30, told THR in an email. “I’m extremely proud of the work the team has done, and now that we’ve successfully established a foundation, I’m excited about what’s next for audiobooks at Spotify — but I’m an entrepreneur at heart, and on a personal level, I’m excited to be getting back to the startup world. I felt that now was a good time to begin that transition, as the team at Spotify is set up well for success in our future work.”
As Spotify begins the search for Zicherman’s successor to lead the company’s audiobooks product strategy, Spotify’s vp business affairs, David Kaefer, will continue overseeing the business side of the audiobooks expansion.
Zicherman, whose upcoming departure was first reported by The Verge, is the latest in a string of podcast-adjacent executives at Spotify to leave. In the past year, those exits have included Courtney Holt, a major dealmaker for Spotify’s podcasting expansion; Mignano, the Anchor co-founder who left to become a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners; and Dawn Ostroff, the chief content and ad business officer.
In addition to Zicherman, upcoming executive departures include Max Cutler, the company’s top creator partnerships executive and founder of the Spotify-acquired podcast studio Parcast, who is set to leave in May. In announcing his decision to leave in February, Cutler told staff that he was similarly leaving Spotify to “return to [his] entrepreneurial roots” and launch his own venture, though has not yet shared additional details on that business.
This article was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.
Spotify founder/CEO Daniel Ek is meeting with members of the United States Congress and the Biden administration this week in Washington, D.C., to urge them to pass legislation that would rein in the “stranglehold” companies like Apple have over the competition on their app stores. The executive revealed in a Wednesday (April 19) post on Spotify’s For the Record blog after teasing in a tweet on Sunday that he was headed to the U.S. capital.
The Open App Markets Act — which was introduced in August 2021 and which Ek has previously lobbied for — would bar Apple, Google and other app stores with more than 50 million users from forcing app developers to use their payment systems as a condition of distribution. It would also block app store owners from punishing app developers if they extend deals to customers or offer their app for lower prices elsewhere.
While the bill was advanced by a Senate committee last year, no further action was taken. With this trip, Ek is looking to train a renewed spotlight on the bill, which he hopes will be resurrected for a wider vote by the new Congress.
Apple has lobbied against the bill, arguing that it could lead to consumers loading apps onto their smartphones from places outside of its centralized app store, introducing potential privacy risks.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Ek has argued that Apple and others act as anti-competitive gatekeepers because the terms required for inclusion in their app stores prevent Spotify and others from telling consumers about new products or deal offers.
“Apple prohibits competition by not allowing developers to discuss new products, features, and deals with their own users,” Ek wrote in an editorial posted to Spotify’s blog on Wednesday (April 19). “For instance, Apple promotes deals for Apple Music to Spotify customers, but denies us the same privilege.”
Read Ek’s full editorial on Spotify’s For The Record blog here.
Spotify is targeting radio broadcasters with its latest product update that will make it easier to convert radio shows into on-demand podcasts and offer a new source of ad revenue on existing content.
Beginning Thursday, Spotify’s “broadcast-to-podcast” technology will be fully integrated into Megaphone, the podcast ad tech and hosting platform that Spotify acquired in late 2020. The radio-to-podcast conversion technology itself comes from the Australian podcasting platform Whooshkaa, which was purchased by Spotify in 2021.
Using Megaphone, publishers will be able to input the URL to a live stream of their broadcasted content and automatically have a podcast created from that programming, according to Emma Vaughn, Spotify’s global head of advertising business development and partnerships. The “broadcast-to-podcast” tech will identify ad marker locations, giving publishers the opportunity to remove the ads that were originally aired on the live version of the program and dynamically insert new ad spots in their place, resulting in more revenue.
Companies using “broadcast to podcast” can continue to sell their own ad inventory or, in the near future, do so through the Spotify Audience Network, the audio giant’s ad marketplace.
“These publishers obviously have a ton of content that they create. The libraries are massive, [but] they don’t always have a full podcast operation that’s set up, [so] creating podcast-only content might not make sense for them,” Vaughn told The Hollywood Reporter. “That’s where ‘broadcast to podcast’ comes in because it’s seamless and allows them to join the ecosystem.”
As part of the initial rollout, publishers like Fox Corp. — which has an existing advertising and distribution deal with Megaphone for its Fox Audio Network — will use the conversion technology to create on-demand podcast versions of the broadcaster’s radio programming, though Vaughn said the goal is to attract publishers and broadcasters around the globe that “previously weren’t able to access Megaphone and access the podcast ecosystem.”
The executive also noted that converting radio programming into podcasts could give radio broadcasters a better chance at expanding their reach to Gen-Z listeners.
“More and more people are listening to content via these digital channels,” Vaughn said, “so it’s going to be able to bring some of this broadcast content that was maybe more isolated to a certain type of demographic to the Spotify demographic and to these young audiences that they haven’t been able to capture before.”
This story was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.
As the music industry becomes increasingly conscious of — and vocal about — the challenges of the streaming model, fraudulent streams have become a source of growing frustration. “Every penny that goes to a fraudulent stream is a penny that doesn’t go to a legitimate stream,” says Richard Burgess, president and CEO of the American Association of Independent Music. “Fraudulently increased stream counts can affect recording budgets, licensing deals, catalog valuations and can result in the misallocation of marketing budgets.”
The French government, which recently published the results of a months-long, country-wide investigation into streaming fraud, portrayed understanding the impacts of this activity as an imperative. “The stakes are high in our country as well as in the rest of the world: the development of music services, which can be free and financed by advertising, or paid through subscriptions, as individual or family plans, constitutes a tremendous opportunity for the music sector, after years of a long crisis,” the report asserted. “…Such growth whets the appetites and stimulates the creativity of those who seek to abuse the system.”
“The multiplication of fake streams, that is to say the processes allowing [bad actors] to artificially boost play counts or views to generate an income, is nothing short of theft,” the report continued.
The French study, conducted without data from YouTube, Apple Music, or Amazon Music, found that 1% to 3% of plays were fraudulent, while also noting somberly that “the reality of fake streams goes beyond what is detected.” BeatDapp, a Vancouver-based company that creates fraud detection software for labels, publishers, distributors and streaming services, believes the global level of fraud is higher. “In 2020, estimates were 3 to 10% of all streaming activity was fraud,” the company wrote in 2022. “Today, we confidently say it’s at least 10%, and more in some regions. That equals ~$2B in potentially misallocated streaming revenues this year, and will be ~$7.5B by 2030 if left unchecked.”
So what forms does streaming fraud take? According to Burgess, the practice “covers a multitude of techniques used to increase stream counts or impressions by other than legitimate means.”
Here are three of the most common:
Bots
Discussion of streaming fraud often turns quickly to bots, which Burgess defines as “automated software that can be used to generate views, streams or interactions.” To detect bot activity and prevent it from affecting royalty payouts, companies build models that trawl streaming data and look for listening patterns that appear anomalous: BeatDapp likes to discuss an example of finding tens of thousands of accounts all streaming the same 63 songs.
“If I’m trying to push numbers up, I’m going to do it across streaming services in a subtle fashion this way,” BeatDapp co-CEO Andrew Batey says. “Spread it across a lot of accounts and multiple platforms, and you can drive a significant number of plays with no one looking.”
Click Farms
Streaming services are looking for suspicious play patterns that don’t reflect human behavior. Fraudsters are aware of this, so they try to camouflage their activity in ways that appear human. One method is to get actual humans to press Play through what are known as “click farms.”
Eric Drott, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin who has written about streaming fraud, describes these as “enterprises concentrating low-paid, precarious workers who are engaged to perform the sort of rote, repetitive tasks that keep the flows of digital capitalism moving: creating social media accounts, moderating content for platforms, clicking online ads, liking or rating items and, of course, generating plays on streaming services.” Accounts that stream music 24 hours a day or stem from a smartphone that never moves or dips below 100% power could be evidence of click-farm activity.
Imposters
A third prominent form of fraud identified by Burgess involves impersonating creators by uploading a version of their song to streaming services and illegally collecting creators’ legitimate royalties. This is a common problem faced by artists who are having a moment on TikTok, for example: Imposters post a version of the TikTok hit on streaming services under a slightly different name, aiming to divert some streams (and hopefully royalties) their way.
“It happens to every single viral artist,” says one manager who shepherded a viral act to a major-label deal last year. There are many distribution companies out there, and managers say that some of them have lax oversight of what’s being uploaded to the DSPs through their platforms. This means artists and their teams have to keep close watch on streaming platforms and issue takedowns when they find imposter versions.
MUMBAI — India is driving Spotify’s international expansion, vaulting into the top five territories in total users for the platform after just four years of operation in the country.
“India is the single market that has contributed the most to our global growth over the last year,” says Gustav Gyllenhammar, Spotify’s vp of markets and subscriber growth. The company’s user count in India has tripled over the last two years, according to Gyllenhammar.
Spotify did not provide numbers, but Comscore estimates the platform has about 55 million monthly active users (MAUs) in India, and Spotify is the country’s top audio-streaming service in terms of engagement, with nearly 10 billion tracks streamed in India in January alone, sources close to the company say. Last year, Spotify says, Bollywood playback singer Arijit Singh tallied more streams on the app than Beyonce. Then in January, Singh broke into the top 10 of Spotify’s Global Top Artists chart, even though most of his plays were in India.
Despite this, India is not a top five revenue market for the service, Gyllenhammar says, demonstrating the limits of the country — which has 1.4 billion people and is expected to soon pass China as the most populous nation — as a music market. Multiple factors are at play, including India’s significantly lower per-stream payouts, a resistance to paying for music subscriptions and the challenges of a market with two official languages and another 22 regional ones.
India was the 17th-largest recorded-music market in 2021 with $219 million in revenue, up 20% from 2020 and driven largely by streaming, according to IFPI’s Global Music Report. But at just $0.16, its per-capita music revenue is among the lowest in the world.
India’s economy is one of the world’s largest, but a 2022 report by the International Monetary Fund ranks its per-capita income at 140 out of 190 countries, which contributes to the problems streaming services have in getting more consumers to pay for subscriptions. A monthly Spotify subscription costs 119 rupees ($1.45) compared with $9.99 in the United States. Gyllenhammar says the service doesn’t plan to increase prices in India in the near future.
India’s streaming market is estimated to have over 300 million MAUs. (For comparison, there are 219 million in the United States.) When Spotify launched there in 2019, it was the eighth major audio-streaming service to enter a market ruled by local streaming services Gaana, JioSaavn and Wynk. Since then, it has overtaken Gaana, which has turned into a subscription-only service after talks for an acquisition by Wynk’s parent, the telco Bharti Airtel, fell through. JioSaavn, which saw an overhaul of its top management last year, has witnessed a fall in engagement.
Though JioSaavn and Wynk still have more MAUs than Spotify, 20.1% of respondents picked Spotify as their favorite music streaming service, compared with 4.9% who chose either JioSaavn or Wynk, in a study conducted last year by IFPI and the Indian Music Industry, the country’s recorded-music trade group. (YouTube topped the list with 46%.)
Spotify’s closest competition for engagement, according to industry insiders, is ByteDance-owned Resso, which officially launched in India in March 2020 as one of three test markets for the app outside of China. (Indonesia and Brazil are the others.) Resso, they say, has a stronger presence in smaller cities and tallies a similar number of streams. But it’s been growing at a slower rate than Spotify and has been affected by the loss of Sony Music’s catalog — which includes several hit Indian film soundtracks — after Sony removed its titles from the service in September.
Indian music executives say Spotify has better technology for generating algorithmic recommendations and playlist personalization — and that gives it an edge over domestic rivals. It also emulated its local competition by emphasizing the importance of regional-language music and by creating a generous ad-based tier.
In India, Spotify offers a mobile-only “mini” subscription where users pay 7 rupees ($0.09) per day. It offers ad-free music on phones, group listening sessions and downloads of 30 songs per device. There aren’t any restrictions on the number of songs free users can stream in the ad-based tier.
A Focus On Servicing Local Languages
Today, in addition to English, Spotify offers its service in 12 Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi and Urdu. To focus on local languages, Spotify has had to customize its operations. “Until we came to India, most [of our] markets [were dominated by] one or two languages,” says Amarjit Singh Batra, GM/managing director for India. “The whole structure, from the teams to the way we work to how we look at recommendations, curation — every piece had to be re-looked at.”
Local content accounts for about 85% of listening on domestic platforms like JioSaavn and Wynk, for example, but initially only made up 20% to 30% of Spotify streams in the market. “When we launched, consumption looked very similar to many other countries globally, [which is] predominantly international English-language music,” Gyllenhammar says. Then Spotify pushed to expand its audience beyond India’s big cities, and today, out of Spotify’s 184 markets, India has the highest share of local consumption, at 70%.
During the pandemic, as competitors tightened their budgets, the Swedish company says it spent heavily on nationwide and region-specific advertising and marketing — including ads on broadcast and streaming TV. “We have never paid so much attention to marketing in any single market,” says Gyllenhammar. The platform has run marketing campaigns in Hindi and English, as well as the four main languages spoken in south India: Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam.
Spotify has also resisted pressure from labels to ensure their songs feature at the top of playlists, which music companies had come to expect from Indian platforms. “They keep looking at Spotify to be something like that,” says Padmanabhan “Paddy” NS, Spotify’s head of artist and label partnerships. Instead, Spotify realized early on the potential of independent and non-film music and showcased them through playlists and programs such as Radar. The strategy paid dividends during the pandemic when the closure of cinemas led to a paucity of new soundtrack releases, which local platforms had relied on.
Since it launched in the country, Spotify has more than doubled its number of India-based employees, Gyllenhammar and Singh say, and they’re planning to expand their India ad sales teams five-fold by the end of the year. (They decline to share how many people the company currently employs in India.)
While India is primarily a low-price, high-volume play for Spotify, the country offers tremendous growth potential. It has the second-largest share of internet and smartphone users in the world (after China), at about 658 million, though that’s just under half of its total population. (The United States and the United Kingdom both have 90% internet penetration.) “If you look at other sectors online, whether it’s in search or social media or e-commerce, [India is] a billion-dollar market for the global players,” Gyllenhammar says.
Singh Batra says Spotify’s focus over the next four years will be on reaching “a level where the audience for each and every core [Indian] language is able to say, ‘Spotify is for me, for my region.’” By focusing on regional-language listeners, Spotify aims to gain new consumers in smaller cities and rural areas, as well as by pulling customers from JioSaavn and Resso, which dominate those regions.
The company says it’s gaining subscribers in India at a faster rate than total users. In 2022, premium subscriptions grew by 85% and MAUs by 80% year on year. Spotify executives say they see India following the same growth path as Latin America, where the level of paid users is now about the same as the global average of 40%.
It took eight years after Spotify launched in Brazil in 2014 for the region to reach that 40% level, Gyllenhammar says. “It didn’t happen in the first four years,” he observes. “It happened during the second phase of those eight years. So similarly, for India, the next four years is a period where we will see improvement on this side.”
Spotify is closing down its live-audio app Spotify Live, the streamer said Monday (April 3).
“After a period of experimentation and learnings around how Spotify users interact with live audio, we’ve made the decision to sunset the Spotify Live app,” a spokesperson for the platform said in a statement. “We believe there is a future for live fan-creator interactions in the Spotify ecosystem; however, based on our learnings, it no longer makes sense as a standalone app. We have seen promising results in the artist-focused use case of ‘listening parties,’ which we will continue to explore moving forward to facilitate live interactions between artists and fans.”
Spotify Live started as the sports-focused live-audio app Locker Room, which Spotify acquired in March 2021 when the streaming service purchased its developer, Betty Labs, for more than $65 million. At the time, the Clubhouse app was popular, and Locker Room was widely viewed as a competitor.
At the time of the acquisition, Spotify said it aimed to “evolve and expand Locker Room into an enhanced live audio experience for a wider range of creators and fans… We’ll give professional athletes, writers, musicians, songwriters, podcasters, and other global voices opportunities to host real-time discussions, debates, ask me anything (AMA) sessions, and more.”
Locker Room was relaunched as Spotify Greenroom in the summer of 2021. The following April, it was renamed Spotify Live and incorporated as a livestream function in the main Spotify app. To celebrate that iteration, Spotify Live streamed Swedish House Mafia’s Paradise Again album release party. But in a round of programming cuts in December, some of the live shows were shut down.
Spotify unveiled a host of new features in March — including a swipe-able vertical feed that will play previews of music and podcasts, a pre-save feature with “countdown pages” for upcoming releases, and “Clips,” which allows acts to post 30-second videos on their artist pages — that were widely viewed as an attempt to contend with a different competitor: TikTok. CEO Daniel Ek called these updates “the biggest” transformation Spotify has undergone in a decade.
Billboard‘s Global Music Index rose 4.2% this week to 1,263.70, its high level in six weeks, as 14 of the 20 stocks in the index were in positive territory. The index’s most valuable companies were among the gainers: Universal Music Group was up 2.1%, Spotify improved 4.1%, and Live Nation climbed 6.1%.
With additional help from Warner Music Group (+5.9%) and Tencent Music Entertainment (+8.1%), the Billboard Global Music Index outperformed the major indexes. The S&P 500 rose 3.5% to 4,109.31 and the Nasdaq composite improved 3.4% to 12,221.91. In the U.K., the FTSE 100 rose 3.1%.
In the first quarter, the Billboard Global Music Index was up 8.2% overall.
Radio company Audacy was the greatest gainer of the week, improving 18.2% to $0.13. In a proxy statement filed March 24, Audacy said it will propose a reverse stock split at the company’s May 24 shareholder meeting. The New York Stock Exchange will initiate a delisting process for stocks that close below $1.00 for 30 consecutive trading days; Audacy’s share price has not exceeded $1.00 since July 5, 2022. A reverse stock split will reduce the number of outstanding shares. Since the value of the company is unaffected by the event, the reverse split will increase the share price.
Elsewhere, Madison Square Garden Entertainment (MSGE) improved 9.6% to $59.07. On Thursday (March 30), MSGE revealed its final plan to separate its live entertainment company from the rest of its businesses. On April 20, the current parent company will be renamed Sphere Entertainment Co. and be comprised of the state-of-the-art Sphere venue, MSG Networks and Tao Group Hospitality. That will leave a pure-play live entertainment company, MSG Entertainment, which includes such venues as Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall.
Competing interests drove SM Entertainment shares higher in February and early March, but the stock has fallen 36.9% in the last three weeks after dropping another 13.1% this week. The K-pop company’s share price started the year at 76,700 won ($58.71) and surged to 114,700 won ($87.79) on Feb. 10 after HYBE acquired a 14.8% stake from SM’s founder, Lee Soo-man. By March 10, when HYBE and Kakao Entertainment were locked in a battle to become SM’s largest shareholder and lead the company’s expansion following its break from Lee, SM shares hit 147,800 ($113.13). Once Kakao Corp. and Kakao Entertainment’s tender offer expired on March 26, the share price plummeted. Still, SM Entertainment shares are up 21.5% year to date.
It’s an uneasy time in the music industry. During a Jan. 31 call with analysts, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek emphasized the positive side of the streaming revolution — “there [are] a lot more artists that are mattering now than ever before” — while still acknowledging the anxiety that’s percolating through the business. “The big counter to that would be: Does it mean that you can sustain yourself, or does it mean we have more one-hit wonders?” Ek asked. “You’re seeing a little bit of both happening in the music industry at the present moment.”
Especially in an era when TikTok appears to run the music industry — trends on the app can send songs bounding up the charts, impacting signing decisions and marketing campaigns — it’s common to hear executives fretting about one-hit wonder overload and the lack of “artist development.” On any given day, a handful of songs flare on the app, soundtracking heaps of videos and leading to jumps in streaming. As a result, “more people are investing in songs that might not have the artist proposition attached to them,” one manager recently lamented to Billboard. “By default, if more of the people responsible for breaking acts are focused on songs, that’s how you have a landscape where there are a trillion one-hit wonders.”
Spotify returned to this theme during its recent Stream On event. Gustav Soderstrom, the platform’s co-president, took the stage to tout the power of features like Release Radar for driving streams and long-term engagement. “That’s why discoveries on Spotify, unlike many other platforms, give creators so much more than just a fleeting moment of viral fame,” he said. He didn’t name TikTok, but it was pretty clear who he was aiming at.
In a statement to Billboard, Ole Obermann, TikTok’s global head of music, hit back against the idea that the popular app prioritizes brief eruptions over long and healthy careers. “In the few years that our music teams at TikTok have been working closely with the musical creator and label community, our commitment to backing artists across the board has helped propel emerging talent and legacy acts to new points of success,” Obermann said. “Artists who broke out from TikTok such as Ice Spice, Lil Nas X, and Coi Leray have sustained multiple Billboard hits. We also see artists such as Tai Verdes, jxdn and Sara Kays who have grown substantial fan bases on TikTok and are building their music careers broadly rather than based on an individual hit song.”
Many in the music industry believe one-hit wonders are newly abundant. But do they show up on the Billboard charts?
Defining a one-hit wonder as an artist that cracks the top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 and never makes it back to that position, the annual percentage of acts fitting this criterion remained relatively constant from 2002 to 2019, according to Billboard‘s analysis. On average, 54% of the acts who made it into the top 40 during this period failed to return with at least a second entry. Though the fraction got as high as 61% and sank as low as 39% during this time period, there was no pronounced increasing trend visible over time.
In 2020 — the most recent full year it seems fair to judge — the portion of artists who made it into the top 40 but didn’t land a second entry was higher: 70%. Of course, this number may fall in the coming years, because these artists haven’t had much time to score a second hit. Changing the definition of a one-hit wonder to match the available data for 2020 — redefining it as an artist that cracks the top 40 and doesn’t make it back in the next two years — causes the portion of one-hit wonders to jump by more than 7% each year, on average. This means it’s likely that 2020’s one-hit wonder count will end up more in line with previous years.
The opposite of a one-hit wonder is an act who enjoys a steady stream of popular singles. Say a “career artist” appears at least 10 times in the top 40 as a lead or featured collaborator: Around 10% of all acts who reached the top 40 once between 2002 and 2020 went on to achieve this goal. The frequency of career artists hasn’t changed much over the years either — roughly the same number emerged from the first half of the time period examined as from the second half.
There is one other noticeable trend in top 40 data: The number of new artists appearing on the upper reaches of the chart is gently declining over time. The fall is gradual, approximately one less new artist every two years. This mirrors a decline in new artists getting top 10 hits, but the trend is less pronounced in the top 40. That’s presumably because it’s easier to reach the top 40 than the top 10, and because there are fewer top 10s annually.
Taken together, this indicates that it is somewhat harder to get a top 40 hit than it was two decades ago, but once artists get that breakout hit, they have roughly the same odds of eventually building a catalog of big tracks. The first development is cause for concern. But the second should be reassuring — the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Vice President Kamala Harris has partnered with Spotify for an official playlist of African music as a means of crystallizing her current trip across the continent, Billboard can exclusively reveal.
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The playlist, titled “My Travels: Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia,” is live on the streaming platform, and is designed to “amplify the artists and sounds from my travels” across those countries, per its description. The vice president arrived in Ghana on Sunday (March 26) for her first trip to Africa while in office, and will visit Tanzania on Wednesday and Zambia on Friday before returning to the U.S. on Sunday.
According to Spotify, VP Harris worked closely with the streamer to curate the playlist, which features Ghanaian and Ghanaian-American artists like Amaarae, Moses Sumney and Black Sherif; Tanzanian and Tanzanian-American artists like Harmonize, Zuchu and Alikiba; and Zambian and Zambian-American artists including Chile One Mr. Zambia, Yo Maps and Chef 187.
On Monday, Harris will visit Vibrate Space, a Ghanaian music work station that local collective Surf Ghana opened last October with audio recording, mixing, mastering and editing equipment, along with consultations and Masterclass sessions. Spotify supported the launch of Vibrate Space last year, and the vice president plans to meet with local artists — including some featured on her playlist — at the studio.
Click here to listen to the playlist, and check out the full track list below:
1. All My Cousins, “Act a Fool”2. Moses Sumney, “Me in 20 Years”3. T’neeya, “Pretty Mind”4. Amaarae, “Reckless & Sweet”5. Herman Suede, “Kumbaya”6. Moliy, “Ghana Bop”7. Ria Boss, “Call Up”8. Harmonize, “Single Again”9. Chile One Mr Zambia, “I Love You”10. Black Sherif, “Kwaku the Traveller”11. Jux, Marioo, Papi Cooper & Tony Duardo, “Nice (Kiss)12. Zuchu, “Utaniua”13. Yo Maps, “Aweah”14. Alikiba, “Mahaba”15. Jay Melody, “Sawa”16. Mbosso feat. Costa Titch & Alfa Kat, “Shetani”17. Sarkodie feat. Black Sherif, “Country Side”18. Platform Tz & Marioo, “Fall”19. Darassa feat. Bien, “No Body”20. Chef 187 & Blake, “Nobody”21. Kuami Eugene & Rotimi, “Cryptocurrency”22. Coolguy Pro, “Cherry”23. Marioo & Abbah, “Lonely”24. M3NSA, “Fanti Love Song”25. Baaba J, “Lumumba”