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In March of 2022, Epic Games, best known as the maker of Fortnite, acquired Bandcamp, a crucial commerce platform for independent musicians. While the purchase surprised the music industry, the marriage ultimately proved short-lived: Bandcamp was acquired again on September 28, this time by the licensing platform Songtradr.
Bandcamp is widely loved for its role in the indie music community, and in an interview, Paul Wiltshire, CEO of Songtradr, was eager to assuage any fears about the company’s new owner. “We think Bandcamp is a great platform as it is,” he says. “There’s not a need to change it into anything other than what it is.”
The plan for now, he continues, is “introduce the opportunity of licensing” to Bandcamp artists who are interested in seeding their music to various brands and platforms. “We think that alone is a really big piece, and we want to get that right,” Wiltshire adds. “That will create a lot of opportunity for the independent market and the artists on there.”
Before we get into the Bandcamp acquisition, can you explain what Songtradr does?
The genesis of Songtradr was to build a platform that made licensing easier for both sides of the marketplace. On one side, you have artists, songwriters, and also labels and publishers; on the other side it’s brands, agencies, games, apps, platforms, anyone who uses music in content, film, TV, etc. The problems associated with licensing are mainly due to fragmentation — both publishing and recording rights need to be licensed whenever you legitimately license a track. And so there’s inherent fragmentation, because much of the time there’s a publisher, and there’s a label and they’re two different parties. The same thing happens with independents, where they co-write with two different people. We wanted to build a platform that solved the rights fragmentation and brought parties together so that they could transact together.
Are there specific areas of licensing you focus on?
Where we’ve focused over the last five years in particular is music for brands and advertising agencies. We work with so many of the Fortune 500 brands around the world; we’ve got teams across Europe and Asia and Americas and Australia. We try to provide a complete solution for brands — everything from understanding the sonic architecture of that brand, to working with composers to make the right music for a campaign, to licensing music at scale if they want music for everyday use with their social media campaigns, right through to their licensing of famous track.
The second vertical we focused on was games, apps and platforms because they have a lot of technical challenges. With digital platforms, it’s more complicated. If we think about brands as being one to one, licensing one track to an ad campaign, platforms and games is like 1000s to one — many tracks being used in a game, app, or platform. We wanted to solve the big problems associated with that.
What led you to the Bandcamp acquisition?
Our strategy around M&A up until Bandcamp has been buying companies that really marry that vision of simplifying licensing. The strategy around Bandcamp was: We’re seeing a trend in the market where music is becoming increasingly important in brands and games and fitness apps and meditation apps, all these different touchpoints. And we’ve seen an increased trend in brands in particular: They want to know about the artist who’s behind the music.
We’ve built technology around being able to best match the right music to a brand or to a customer. How do we ensure the right music is used in an advertising campaign or in a game that aligns with the target audience, whether it’s the gamer or the customer that’s watching the advertisement?
We look at Bandcamp and it’s the largest independent music community in the world. You could argue SoundCloud is, but that’s more than just an independent artist community — there are a bunch of other things as well. Bandcamp legitimately has that core independent artist market. We looked at the business model, and we love the business as it is; there’s no plans to change the existing model. What we wanted to do was connect licensing to the Bandcamp offering.
This would be an opt-in only basis for the artists so that they continue to control their rights and control their destiny. Licensing is not for every artist, and we want them to be able to choose what they want to participate in. An artist on Bandcamp can not only sell their vinyl, their T-shirts, their digital album, but they can also have the opportunity to license music into multiple different areas.
We’ve seen what happens when an independent artist has a license it can be quite transformational in terms of streaming numbers. We’ve licensed music to TikTok and suddenly an artist has blown up unexpectedly because brands got ahold of it. We really believe in licensing as being a key driver for your expanded awareness of an artist’s career.
Can you explain a bit more how that tech works matching brands to songs?
We bought an AI company called Musicube last year. They scan the audio file and they create metadata points that describe it in simple terms like mood, BPM, that fairly obvious stuff. But they went a degree further: We can now predict the audience that would most align with sections of the song right down to like small fractions, like five seconds. We can look at a track using a computer amd in milliseconds understand, ‘that chorus is going to be awesome for a 18 to 23 year old female on the east coast, the United States who likes the following things.’
How does that help on the licensing side?
When you have millions of tracks, it helps us figure out, what do we pitch, what do we place, what do we suggest to a brand? If we’re using creativity on the one hand and data in the right hand we argue we get a better result than just objectivity or just data. We use the tech to help choose the music.
We will be creating a user experience that gives them the option — do you want to have your music participate in this system? That’ll be the music that we start to curate and pitch.
We want to be very clear to Bandcamp artists: They will always have the choice of where their music goes. Licensing is quite a steep learning curve for many — what does it mean, what are all the different opportunities, some are paying pennies, some are paying a huge amount. There’s a lot to unpack, so we know that’s going to be a careful learning process and it will take time to properly communicate.
My impression was that Bandcamp got a big bump in engagement during Covid. Has that continued?
Just speaking from a very on-high view from the detail that I have, there was a quite a significant bump up during that period. But it looks like there’s been a step-up that was sustained, and it’s continuing [at a level higher than it was]. More awareness was raised of what Bandcamp is; there are more fans and more artists using it. That period educated the market to be more self-sufficient online, to do more online, to make passive income a reality without being wholly reliant on their performance. It’s one of the few blessings of that period.
Songtrader is very supportive of the artist community and I come from that background. I was a songwriter and record producer after I tried to be an artist for a few years. We are musicians. It’s important that the Bandcamp audience knows that that’s where we come from, that’s what we believe in.
We really want to protect the value of music rights. We’re not trying to package up a bunch of music and sell it cheaply. That’s not what we do. We’re very much into increasing the value of music for all so when someone licenses music, they get a better result because they’ve licensed something that’s actually on brand that actually suits their time. And on the other side, that music is properly paid for and it attracts the right fees.
Even in the midst of her Travis Kelce saga and the countdown to her Eras Tour concert film, Taylor Swift is dominating TikTok with a song and trend that aren’t connected to either of those things. On Wednesday (Sept. 27), actors Penn Badgley and Kevin Bacon joined forces for their own spin on the “August” […]
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In a new social media video, Texas rap legend Paul Wall surprised his fans with a full head of silver hair and a beard to match.
As reported by HipHopDX, Houston native went on TikTok on Monday (September 18th). “1st off, why my face look like the old man filter lol, we had a lot of fun yesterday, perfoming [sic] halftime with @Louie TheSinger and watching the @Houston Texans,” he wrote in the caption. He’d go on to describe how much fun they had at the game and show love to Texans wide receiver Nathaniel “Tank” Dell.
Fans who tuned in were immediately struck by seeing “The People’s Champ” without the buzz cut and the soul patch that has been his look for two decades. The only parts of his signature style that were evident were the Texas drawl and the stunning gold grills.
“THATS PAUL WALL !!!????” one TikTok user wrote in shock, as another in the comments added: “Ain’t no way this Paul mane.” Another commenter wrote, “When I tell you I thought he was using the old man filter I literally thought he was 20-25.”
Others praised the new look. “He has aged like the finest wine, Lord have mercy,” one wrote with the blowing steam emoji. Another joked, “Paul Wall Lookin like The H-Town Leonardo DiCaprio.”
For the “I’m Throwed” artist, the response to his new look in the video is a sign of his own acceptance of it. In an interview with TMZ, he spoke about being insecure about going gray early. “But honestly, I always had insecurities and hang-ups about my gray hair as a younger person,” Paul Wall began, “Now, I don’t mean to be ageist or any of that, but once I hit 40, it just felt like being gray was more age-appropriate. So as soon as I hit 40, I swear, all my hang-ups, insecurities, they went out the window … I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m letting them grays show!’”
Paul Wall is currently looking to release a new album, The Great Wall, in December.
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TikTok announced new tools to help creators label content that was generated by artificial intelligence. In addition, the company said on Tuesday (Sept. 19) that it plans to “start testing ways to label AI-generated content automatically.”
“AI enables incredible creative opportunities, but can potentially confuse or mislead viewers if they’re not aware content was generated or edited with AI,” the company wrote. “Labeling content helps address this, by making clear to viewers when content is significantly altered or modified by AI technology.”
As AI technology has become better — at generating credible-looking images or mimicking pop stars’ voices, for example — and more popular, regulators have expressed increasing concern about the technology’s potential for mis-use.
In July, President Biden’s administration announced that seven leading AI companies made voluntary commitments “to help move toward safe, secure, and transparent development of AI technology.” One key point: “The companies commit to developing robust technical mechanisms to ensure that users know when content is AI generated, such as a watermarking system. This action enables creativity with AI to flourish but reduces the dangers of fraud and deception.”
Voluntary commitments are, of course, voluntary, which is likely why TikTok also announced that it will “begin testing an ‘AI-generated’ label that we eventually plan to apply automatically to content that we detect was edited or created with AI.” Tools to determine whether an image has been crafted by AI already exist, and some are better than others. In June, The New York Times tested five programs, finding that the “services are advancing rapidly, but at times fall short.”
The challenge is that as detection technology improves, so does the tech for evading detection. Cynthia Rudin, a computer science and engineering professor at Duke University, told the paper that “every time somebody builds a better generator, people build better discriminators, and then people use the better discriminator to build a better generator. The generators are designed to be able to fool a detector.”
Similar detection efforts are being discussed in the music industry as it debates how to weigh AI-generated songs relative to tracks that incorporate human input.
“You have technologies out there in the market today that can detect an AI-generated track with 99.9% accuracy, versus a human-created track,” Believe co-founder and CEO Denis Ladegaillerie said in April. “We need to finalize the testing, we need to deploy,” he added, “but these technologies exist.”
The streaming service Deezer laid out its own plan to “develop tools to detect AI-generated content” in June. “From an economic point of view, what matters most is [regulating] the things that really go viral, and usually those are the AI-generated songs that use fake voices or copied voices without approval,” Deezer CEO Jeronimo Folgueira told Billboard this summer.
Moises, another AI-technology company, dove into the fray as well, announcing its own set of new tools on Aug. 1. “There’s definitely a lot of chatter” about this, Matt Henninger, Moises’ vp of sales and business development told Billboard. “There’s a lot of testing of different products.”
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TikTok is a force these days and with many artists taking to the platform to push their music, Billboard has joined forces with the social media site to launch a new Top 50 chart to track the platform’s most popular singles. You’ll never guess who leads the pack.
According to Variety, one Sexyy Red is sitting atop the TikTok Billboard Top 50 Chart thanks to her smash hit “SkeeYee,” which is followed by Doja Cat’s “Paint The Town Red” and Taylor Swift’s “August,” which come in at No. 2 and No. 3 respectively. Though we weren’t given precise numbers, the new monitoring system will be determined by a number of factors that are relevant in the day and age of social media that we wouldn’t have seen coming in the days of cassette tapes, CD’s and vinyl records.
God, we feel old.
Variety reports:
This is the first official chart in the U.S. to monitor music discovery and engagement on the platform. The chart is based on a combination of creations, video views, and user engagement by the U.S. TikTok community, and will be released weekly on Thursdays.
“TikTok is already the world’s most powerful platform for music discovery and promotion, and each week our passionate community of music fans drives songs onto the Billboard charts. It therefore made perfect sense to partner with Billboard to create the TikTok Billboard Top 50 Chart. The chart gives a clear picture of the music that is being listened to on TikTok, and consequently starting to trend on DSPs and other services,” said Ole Obermann, global head of music business development at TikTok.
“We are thrilled to partner on the first Billboard chart on TikTok,” said Mike Van, president of Billboard. “At Billboard, we are constantly evolving our charts to reflect how fans engage with music and connect them more deeply with the artists they love. We see a clear opportunity to recognize the way music discovery on TikTok is shaping popular culture and are proud to offer this tool to the industry, while offering brands a new way to engage with music fans at scale. You’re not no. 1 until you’re no. 1 on Billboard.”
Naturally, Sexxy Red was ecstatic to be the first music artist to be crowned the queen of TikTok’s Billboard chart and expressed as much when she was informed of the news.
“I am so excited that so many of my songs are charting on TikTok and Billboard’s new chart,” Sexxy Red said, according to Variety. “I always knew I would be a No. 1 type of artist, so I want to thank all my fans on TikTok for running my music up! I’m just being me on TikTok and people love it.”
It’s only a matter of time before Billboard somehow starts charting whatever songs we can’t get out of our heads on a daily basis. Those songs should be interesting to learn.
What do y’all think of the new TikTok Billboard chart? Let us know in the comments section below.
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Consumers and the marketers who sell to them agree: They “hear from too many influencers — and not enough real people — in marketing.” That’s according to an iHeartMedia study the company unveiled Wednesday (Sept. 13) that explores the gap between marketers and their audiences and tries to identify biases and blind spots.
Though the wording is a little bit confusing — most influencers are still real people, with a few exceptions, i.e. Lil Miquela — this conclusion aligns with what many music marketers have been saying for over a year. In essence: Throwing bags of money at popular TikTok accounts and hoping this will magically lead to music discovery and drive streams is not an effective or efficient approach.
Marketing spends “started becoming less effective when people and brands were really looking at people’s influence based upon follower count,” says Coltrane Curtis, founder of the marketing agency Team Epiphany. Curtis has been an active proponent of the notion that “the pay-to-play model is ineffective, oversaturated and counterintuitive.” “Influence is about trust,” he adds. “When you start seeing everyone paying for it, you feel duped and taken advantage of.”
Last year, the music consulting agency ContraBrand analyzed TikTok’s top 200 from the first half of 2022. The company determined that “paid-for tactics, such as influencers and ads, accounted for success in under 12% of the platform’s viral tracks.” In 2020, as industry after industry awoke to TikTok’s power as an advertising tool and started pouring money into the platform, “you would literally have an influencer’s rate to post go from $500 to $1,500 in a day,” ContraBrand co-founders Sean Taylor and Jacorey Barkley told Billboard last year. “That was happening day in, day out. Influencer campaigns have become both less accessible and less effective.”
iHeart laid out its new study — and gently prodded marketers to think about spending more on podcast advertising (a sector in which the company is highly invested) — during a chat between Conal Byrne, CEO of the company’s digital audio group, and author and podcast host Malcolm Gladwell in Manhattan.
The conclusions of the study echoed many of the think pieces written after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election: Coastal cities are out of touch with large swathes of the country. In this case, the focus was on marketers themselves, who spend time in their own “bubbles,” never taking the time to notice that others might not share their passions and priorities.
This point was driven home through a barrage of statistics. While all the marketers surveyed were familiar with NFTs, 40% of consumers had never heard of them. Marketers have the hots for artificial intelligence — 66% “are excited about the potential” the tech “will unlock for society” — but consumers are tepid about the robot-driven future, with only 39% excited. Marketers are apparently “motivated by fortune, fame and fear;” “consumers are motivated by friends and family.”
The study did not address itself to the music industry. But in her opening remarks, Gayle Troberman, iHeart’s chief marketing officer, sounded much like a major label executive. There is “more competition than ever before… for consumer attention,” she said. “We’ve never had more data, and yet, it’s never been harder to win.”
On Thursday (Sept. 14), TikTok and Billboard announced the TikTok Billboard Top 50 chart — a new weekly chart that will track the most popular songs on the platform in the U.S. The chart is available to all TikTok users in the U.S. and on Billboard.com.
The TikTok Billboard Top 50 is the first chart to monitor the popularity of music on the video-sharing platform. The chart is based on a combination of creations, video views and user engagement by the U.S. TikTok community and will be released weekly every Thursday, starting today.
Sexyy Red is the first artist to top the chart, with “SkeeYee” starting at No. 1 on this week’s inaugural TikTok Billboard Top 50. (Three other Sexxy Red songs also land on this week’s tally.) Doja Cat’s “Paint the Town Red” — which climbs to No. 1 on this week’s Billboard Hot 100 — is the No. 2 track on the first TikTok Billboard Top 50, while Taylor Swift’s folklore track “august” lands at No. 3.
“TikTok is already the world’s most powerful platform for music discovery and promotion, and each week our passionate community of music fans drives songs onto the Billboard charts,” said Ole Obermann, global head of music business development at TikTok. “It therefore made perfect sense to partner with Billboard to create the TikTok Billboard Top 50 chart. The chart gives a clear picture of the music that is being listened to on TikTok, and consequently starting to trend on DSPs and other services.”
In addition to the contemporary top three on the new chart, Dazz Band’s “Let It Whip” — a top five Hot 100 hit from 1982 — lands in the top 10 of the first TikTok Billboard Top 50, along with country tracks from Zach Bryan and Tim McGraw and songs from R&B legend Charlie Wilson and emo band Pinegrove.
“We are thrilled to partner on the first Billboard chart on TikTok,” said Mike Van, president, Billboard. “At Billboard, we are constantly evolving our charts to reflect how fans engage with music and connect them more deeply with the artists they love. We see a clear opportunity to recognize the way music discovery on TikTok is shaping popular culture and are proud to offer this tool to the industry, while offering brands a new way to engage with music fans at scale. You’re not No. 1 until you’re No. 1 on Billboard.”
For her part, Sexyy Red wants to thank her fans on TikTok for “running my music up!”
“I am so excited that so many of my songs are charting on the TikTok Billboard Top 50 chart,” said Sexyy Red. “I always knew I would be a No. 1 type of artist, so I want to thank all my fans on TikTok for running my music up! I’m just being me on TikTok and people love it.”
Also celebrating Sexyy Red’s new chart-topper is Larry Jackson’s entertainment company gamma, which counts the rookie rapper as one of its early success stories after launching in March. Jackson tells Billboard he’s “so incredibly proud to have a track from one of our artists, Sexyy Red, debut at No. 1 on the inaugural TikTok Billboard Top 50 chart — a chart which I believe will have an industry-wide importance alongside the Hot 100 and Billboard 200 charts. And to have four tracks in the top 50 on this new chart is something to marvel at as well.
“As a company that supports, nurtures and powers independent artists and creators, we believe that this is an incredible precursor for what’s to come in this era of independent business thought leaders such as Stan and Jay of [Sexyy Red’s label] Open Shift, and fiercely independent artists such as Sexyy Red, who are tackling the new modem music business with a sense of bravery and adventurousness that doesn’t subscribe to the norm or the conventionality of how it’s been done.”
TikTok users can find the new chart by pressing the round icon on the bottom corner of the screen in the TikTok app and tapping the “Music Charts” button in the top right. The chart can also be found on Billboard.com, updated weekly each Thursday.
The scene will be immediately familiar to anyone who has attended a music festival: a DJ riling up a crowd, playing a hit but ratcheting up the anticipation by toying with the melody before the drums charge to the rescue. Only this time, the hit hadn’t come out yet — the South Korean producer Peggy Gou was teasing an unreleased single titled “(It Goes Like) Nanana.”
Attendees at the Lost Nomads festival outside of Marrakesh hardly seemed to mind; a TikTok video capturing Gou’s set shows listeners throwing their hands in the air with abandon. One onlooker, standing behind the DJ’s right shoulder, removes the cigarette hanging unlit from his lips to unleash a hoot just as the percussion hits.
That sunset TikTok clip helped kickstart a viral chain of events that has turned “(It Goes Like) Nanana” into Gou’s mainstream breakthrough. The single is her first to scale the Billboard charts, climbing inside the top 40 on the Global 200, and it’s earned 24.5 million on-demand streams in the U.S. since its release, according to Luminate. For a time it was the lead track on Spotify’s flagship playlist Today’s Top Hits, a spot usually taken up by major-label superstars, not dance producers on the independent label XL.
No one is more surprised than Gou. She didn’t have TikTok when “(It Goes Like) Nanana” started to go like viral; she found out about that success from her friends. She also doesn’t watch the charts. “I really did not expect this reaction,” Gou says. “My song was never on a chart before. In the beginning I wasn’t sure what [charting] meant exactly.”
But the excursion into new commercial territory is welcome — a relief, in fact. After her rubbery 2019 single “Starry Night” became popular on dancefloors, Gou felt pressured to top it. “Sometimes pressure is a good thing,” she says. “It always kind of pushes me.”
“(It Goes Like) Nanana” was born during the pandemic, while Gou was binging dance music and hip-hop from the 1990s. The simplicity of the house music she absorbed from that decade stood out: “A lot of the hooks are repetitive, but it’s still catchy, you don’t get bored.” She cites SNAP!’s chugging hit “Rhythm Is a Dancer” and the German producer ATB as touchstones.
Musical train-spotters on TikTok have thrown out a handful of other references in video comments: Kylie Minogue! (Presumably because she knows her way around a “la-la-la,” which isn’t too far from a “na-na-na.”) “I Like To Move It”! (Maybe in the progression of the bass line?) A Touch of Class’s “Around the World;” Gala’s “Freed From Desire” — take a fistful of Ultimate Dance Party CDs from the second half of the ’90s, throw them in a blender, and you might get something along the lines of “(It Goes Like) Nanana.”
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Gou’s biggest tracks to date — “Starry Night” and “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane)” — are sung predominantly in Korean. But when she tried that approach on “(It Goes Like) Nanana,” “it didn’t really work,” so she ended up singing it all in English instead. Gou also subbed in an entirely new bass line at the last minute before she started playing it out at festivals like Lost Nomads.
Badr Bounailat, who shot the popular video of Gou near Marrakesh on June 3rd and posted it June 5th, has two theories about why it amassed over 7 million views. First, he says, “I’m a photographer, and that’s a good frame.” (The top comment on his post: “Can we talk about that zoom quality ouffff.”) Second: “People were in it, they were responding well to the song.”
The scenic locale may have helped as well. Harmony Soleil, music director for KNHC, a dance radio station in Seattle, was excited to find the video of Gou in her feed. “I’m a tiny bit obsessed with her, in a not weird way,” Soleil jokes. “She’s always in amazing places. What do you mean, you’re in Morocco and you’re in Spain and you’re in Japan?” (Soleil has been playing Gou on KNHC, jumping at the chance “to support an artist who hasn’t had a lot of U.S. radio airplay otherwise.”)
Thanks to all the online attention, by the time “(It Goes Like) Nanana” was officially released on June 15th, Gou felt like the track “was already out.” She was quickly inundated with requests from DJs — from “EDM to jungle to soul to hardcore techno” — asking for stems to make their own remixes.
The biggest re-work has come from Ian Asher, a DJ and producer with a large following who has a knack for making mash-ups that drive TikTokers wild. Asher, who calls “Starry Night” “a classic,” decided to fuse Gou’s single with CamelPhat’s “Cola,” a skipping but hard-nosed dance track that became an international hit in 2017. “What I love about it is that you have two party songs,” Asher explains, “but one is very bright and summery, and the other is like you’re going into a nightclub.”
His mash-up from July went bananas on both TikTok and Instagram, appearing in more than 780,000 user created videos. The “Cola x Nanana” meld is not officially available, which in practice means there are bootleg versions on Spotify, YouTube, and SoundCloud as of this week. “It keeps getting taken down, but people keep re-finding it and uploading it on every platform,” Asher notes. “It’s a whole mini-drama.” (It gets taken down because the remix is technically unauthorized; Gou only gave stems to the German DJ-producer Boys Noize.)
The social media fervor around “(It Goes Like) Nanana” in its various forms propelled the track out of the world of independent-label dance music. “I first became aware of Peggy about three years ago on more of an underground level,” says Jonathan Geronimo, vp of electronic/dance programming for SiriusXM. He found out about “(It Goes Like) Nanana” from his colleagues overseeing TikTok Radio, saw that it was “exploding globally,” and put it into rotation a few days after its official release. SiriusXM has played the track more than 700 times since, and Geronimo believes it has “a shot” to make the jump over to pop radio, “especially with the format really keeping a close eye on what’s happening on TikTok.”
Gou’s single hit the Global 200 in July and has since climbed to No. 33, giving her a strong tailwind as she finalizes her full-length debut, due out early in 2024. The album also draws on her recent dive into ’90s sounds. Once again, though, she is feeling the need to top herself. “I don’t think there’s any track on my album that’s as catchy as ‘Nanana,’” Gou says. “The second single that’s coming out is very different — close to pop.”
That said, predicting audience reactions is notoriously difficult — she didn’t know that millions of listeners would find “(It Goes Like) Nanana” so bewitching. Still, the pressure remains. “My mindset is always: I can do better,” Gou adds. “I can do better.”
The algorithms continue their takeover: On Tuesday (Sept. 12), Spotify rolled out “daylist,” a “hyper-personalized, dynamic” playlist that updates throughout the day to “bring together the niche music and microgenres you usually listen to during particular moments in the day or on specific days of the week.”
Daylist is now available in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland, according to Spotify’s announcement. The playlist updates several times “between sunup and sundown.” After that, who knows — listeners may have to choose their own music for a few hours before bedtime.
Spotify was once known for its editorial playlists like Today’s Top Hits and Baila Reggaeton. Since these functioned much like radio, concentrating a lot of listener attention on the same handful of songs, they were watched closely in the music industry. Placements were eagerly sought after due to their ability to drive a lot of streaming activity.
But since at least 2019, Spotify has been increasingly focused on rolling out auto-personalized playlists. That year, the service took collections like Beast Mode and Chill Hits, which previously had been the same for all listeners, and personalized them “for each listener based on their particular taste,” according to a company press release. (This change did not affect the biggest editorial playlists.)
Spotify found that this shift had three effects. Most importantly for the streaming service, listeners tuned in to personalized collections for longer. This is notable: Users were more likely to keep playing songs that Spotify fed to them based on their previous listening habits, rather than tracks selected by editors. Chalk one up to the machines.
In addition, the drive towards personalization meant that the streaming wealth was spread across more acts — raising “the number of artists featured on playlists by 30% and the number of songs listeners are discovering by 35%,” according to the company’s announcement. “We found that, after discovering a song through a personalized editorial playlist, the number of listeners who then seek out the track on their own for repeat listens is up by 80%,” Spotify’s blog post continued. “In fact, the average number of times a listener saves a track is up 66%.”
Personalization has become more important than ever in the age of TikTok, which is constantly praised for its ability to discern small differences between users’ preferences and serve up videos that keep them scrolling. “Everything on TikTok feels like it was meant especially for you,” one music executive told Billboard last year.
Daylight is Spotify’s latest attempt to generate that same feeling.
“You’re ever-changing,” the company wrote, “and your playlists should be too.”
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A video of a Black woman in Houston who was allegedly bashed in the face with a brick by a man she rejected has gone viral and sparked outrage and discussion.
As reported by Madame Noire, in video shared on TikTok, influencer and “junior scholar and former journalist” Rho Bashe posted a clip that showed her brutally beaten in the aftermath of being attacked by an unidentified man with a brick. Bashe tearfully details that the man who attacked her did so because she declined to give him her phone number. “Y’all, this man just hit me in my face with a brick and all these Black men just watched. This man…grabbed a rock and hit me in my face because I wouldn’t give him my number,” she said.
Bashe then started yelling at the onlookers for not taking any action and letting the man leave unbothered. One of them responded, “What did you want us to do?” after the Houston woman yelled at them. “I want you to be a man and do something. You gonna let a man hit me in my face?” she responded. In a follow-up video, Bashe is seen in a hospital gown in tears, with a large swollen lump on the right side of her face.“How is this okay? This is what y’all doin’ to women?”, she said.
The video has gotten numerous views on social media and spurred trolls who’ve cherry-picked videos from Bashe’s account to try to claim that her past actions justified the attack. This has led others to come to her defense, including author Candice Marie Bonbon who wrote a thread on X, formerly Twitter decrying the ill behavior: “Men searched her socials and are using her clips (she’s a feminist) to justify why men shouldn’t have intervened. This is truly hell.”
Bashe posted a follow-up video on TikTok on Tuesday (September 5th), stating that she has endured “a lot of bullying and bullshit” since she posted the original videos. She stated that her assailant “jumped in a car with a bunch of Black women” before getting away. “Y’all know who he is. Put him out there,” she pleaded. “Center his face and then talk about it because he’s the one that got to make a choice. I didn’t get to make a fucking choice.” She would then go on to thank everyone who amplified her story and defended her.
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