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Finneas is not letting anyone talk down his sister’s relationship online. In the comments of a Monday (Dec. 26) TikTok video, the singer-songwriter defended Billie Eilish from an attack on her relationship with The Neighborhood‘s Jesse Rutherford.
A TikTok user made a snappy video in response to one of Finneas’ recent videos and replied in a stitch video, “Oh yeah? Well, your sister’s dating a 31 year old man and your music is s–tty.” Finneas found the response video and commented, “I want my sister to be happy and safe and she is a 21 year old adult perfectly entitled to make her own life decisions.”
The Grammy-winning producer expressed a similar sentiment regarding Eilish’s relationship with The Neighborhood singer in November, telling E! News, “Listen, as long as she’s happy, I’m happy.”
As for the “Happier Than Ever” singer, she opened up about her relationship with Rutherford in her annual Vanity Fair video interview, published on Nov. 28. “It’s really cool, and I’m really excited and I’m really happy about it,” she said of her romance with the rock star. “I managed to get my life to a point where I not only was known by a person that I thought was the hottest f–king f–ker alive, but pulled his ass! Are you kidding me? Can we just [get a] round of applause for me … thank you, Jesse Rutherford, everyone! I pulled his a–. All me. I did that s–t.”
See the video that Finneas responded to on TikTok below.
More shots fired! JoJo Siwa made quite the accusation about her recent breakup with Avery Cyrus in a new TikTok on Tuesday.
Using a viral sound taken from the “My Brother My Brother and Me” YouTube channel, the former Dance Moms star revealed what she was really trying to say onscreen. “But I love you Why are you breaking up with me??!!!” she wrote before offering up two different options: “There’s someone else” and, uh, “You told one of my best friends that you were excited to be dating me bc you’re ‘growing your career and wanna get to the top’…”
By the end of the lip-synced clip, Siwa makes it clear that the reason for her split was, well, not a third party. She also added some dramatic context in the video’s caption, writing, “And when I said I just wanted to be friends so I didn’t lead you on after an unplanned hookup you wanted nothing to do with me because there was nothing to gain anymore.”
The TikTok comes just one day after the Nickelodeon star vented about the breakup in an Instagram Story posted by her mother, Jessalynn Siwa, in which she claimed she “got used…For views and for clout” by the TikToker during their three-month relationship. “I got tricked into being told I was loved and I got f—ing played,” she added.
Though she has yet to offer an opinion on the latest TikTok, Cyrus responded to Siwa’s Instagram accusations, saying she was “saddened and confused by the situation” in a statement to E! News.
Watch Siwa’s latest TikTok below.
Proud Mother Perms 3-Year-Old Daughter’s Hair And Shares Video On TikTok, Leaving Users Divided Three days ago, a TikTok was posted of a mother perming her three-year-old daughter’s hair in a beauty salon. The video was shared by user @flambingo, who listed her identity as a 23-year-old mother-of-one in her account’s bio. The video was […]
In 2019 and 2020, promoting music on TikTok often meant paying prominent influencers to use a song in their videos. The concept was straightforward — cash for exposure — and on a good day, the results were easy to notice: Streams shot up. “All you needed was those [popular] people to post and a song flew,” one digital marketer reminisced earlier this year.
If this strategy once helped a track fly, it is now more likely to flop. “Bigger influencers actually don’t move the needle on music consumption” anymore, another digital marketer told Billboard in April. Lately worry has been spreading in the music industry that the link between song usage on TikTok more generally and consumption on streaming platforms appears to be losing potency. “For a while it was like, ‘All you gotta do is get a song going on TikTok, and it’s outta here!’” one major label executive says. “It’s not a guarantee anymore” that a song will become a hit.
This sentiment was reflected in a year-end report that TikTok published last week outlining the most popular songs and artists on the app. The top 10 TikTok tracks in the U.S. were streamed far less in 2022 than they were in 2021, according to data from Luminate. And the winners in 2021 were streamed far less than they were in 2020.
This indicates that the correlation between TikTok usage and U.S. streams is weakening. And it offers supports for a growing chorus of marketers who whisper that TikTok video usage isn’t “translating” as well to streams as it did in years past.
In 2020, being a top TikTok track in the U.S. practically ensured streaming success: Luminate data shows that nearly every song in TikTok’s top 10 earned more than 250 million on-demand plays Stateside. Just two years later, that no longer appears to be the case: See Luclover’s “L$d” (20.4 million, No. 2 on TikTok in the U.S.), Yung Lean’s “Ginseng Strip 2002” (71.1 million, No. 3), and Duke & Jones and Louis Theroux’s “Jiggle Jiggle” (82.5 million streams, No. 8). Now “There’s a bunch of stuff going off [on TikTok] that’s not even a hit,” says one A&R.
The overall streaming totals for TikTok’s biggest songs show a sharp decline year over year. Back in 2020, the top 10 singles on TikTok in the U.S. — from Doja Cat’s “Say So” to Roddy Ricch’s “The Box” — collectively amassed more than 4.9 billion Stateside streams. The top 10 songs on TikTok in the U.S. in 2021 — think back to Doja Cat’s “Kiss Me More” and Cardi B’s “Up” — garnered only a little more than 3 billion streams between them in America. And the top 10 TikTok songs in the U.S. in 2022, ranging from Lizzo’s “About Damn Time” to Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” amassed just 1.9 billion Stateside streams combined. That’s a drop of roughly 3 billion streams, or 61%, in two years.
A representative for TikTok declined to comment for this story. In the platform’s year-end report, Ole Obermann, Global Head of Music, said that “13 out of 14 Billboard Hot 100 No. 1’s were supported by viral trends on TikTok.” “Our platform continues to unlock real-world opportunities for artists and labels,” Obermann added, “helping talent to secure record deals, brand collaborations, chart success, or be re-discovered decades later.”
But TikTok has changed markedly in the last few years, making it harder to turn success on the app into those opportunities — at least in the world of streaming. The first challenge for the music industry is saturation. “There’s so much noise; it’s harder to cut through,” says one manager whose acts have been at the center of multiple bidding wars following viral moments. “Once upon a time there wasn’t a lot of money pouring into TikTok. Now the music business, Hollywood, fashion, retail, beverage, everybody is trying to use TikTok to drive their product.” Music is competing for attention not only with other music, the huge amount of new songs and user-generated remixes that pop up each day, but with Marvel movies and canned cocktails.
And as TikTok’s user-base has swelled, it’s splintered into smaller communities that share the same interests, meaning that capturing everyone’s eyeballs — and ears — is increasingly difficult. “More users means TikTok’s ‘For You’ page algorithm has more content to offer, and it also means more data that allows it to be more targeted with its content recommendations,” one digital marketer told Billboard earlier this year. “People are less likely to see the same thing, like Charli D’Amelio dancing, and are more likely to see content from niches the algorithm recommends specifically for them.” As a result, “trends are siloed when they used to be community-wide,” a digital marketing company owner explained recently.
In addition, a handful of executives posit that TikTok is addictive enough that some users, especially younger ones, are starting to “use it as their music service,” according to one indie label-head, rather than leaving the app to go stream music elsewhere. Obermann hit back against this idea in November: “Our community comes to TikTok to watch videos,” he told Billboard, “not to listen to full-length tracks.”
It’s not clear that everyone wants to listen to full-length tracks these days. What is clear is that the interactivity that users find so compelling on TikTok threatens to undermine the traditional streaming experience. When music encountered on the app in a goofy or galvanizing video “is listened to [later] on streaming, it is stripped of all that creative and cultural context,” Mark Mulligan, managing director for music consultancy MIDiA Research, wrote recently. “It is like only listening to the soundtrack of a movie.” Some users may prefer to hear the music along with the video clips, even if it comes in short bursts.
The music industry views TikTok as a means to an end, and the equation has always been simple: More videos on the app using our music = more streams for our music. If the connection between the two weakens, it will have notable implications for A&R and marketing strategy. “There’s very little predictability now,” says one A&R. “You just can’t know how long something will sustain anymore.”
Jaylin Hawkins was working as a court reporter in Washington, D.C. when the pandemic hit. “Suddenly all my work froze,” they say. So the then-25-year-old did what many young adults did at the time: moved back in with their parents. Cooped up in West Palm Beach, Florida, Hawkins recalls friends urging them to get on TikTok. “At the time I thought TikTok was just for kids doing dance moves,” Hawkins admits. But without much else to do, they gave it a try by uploading videos that offered new music suggestions and entertainment news recaps.
Meanwhile in San Luis Obisbo, California, then-college senior Max Motely was also starting to share self-taped videos, highlighting his favorite emerging artists on TikTok. He says he had spent the whole spring relentlessly applying for music business jobs, hoping his summer internship at Paradigm would at least help him land a mail room gig, but with live music shuttered and increased competition for remaining music jobs, Motely found himself 20 applications deep and with no offer letter in sight.
After researching how other people found their first gigs in music, Motely became inspired by the do-it-yourself nature of starting a blog like Jacob Moore’s Pigeons and Planes or a YouTube channel like Anthony Fantano’s The Needle Drop. He thought, since no one was hiring anyway, he might as well spend his quarantine building a TikTok account to recommend music instead, giving the blog and YouTube critic a Gen-Z twist. “I thought this would make sense as the next format for a music blog,” he says, noting the app’s fast-paced nature and its already solid usership of young people.
For many of TikTok’s most successful music curators, the pandemic acted as a catalyst for getting on the app to share recommendations of new songs, and now, about two years later, these videos made in their childhood bedrooms are responsible for launching successful careers in the music business. Plenty of headlines have espoused the merits of using TikTok to promote new artists and songs, but less has been said about the new class of music business executives beginning to break on the app too, circumventing the notoriously exclusive path into the industry usually required.
On TikTok, there seems to be a place for anyone with passion to find an audience, due to algorithms that can quickly connect niche creators with niche audiences. Instead of the traditional model of social media, dependent on following friends to build out news feeds, TikTok serves up content based on shared interests. Because of this, if TikTok thinks a user is a fan of bedroom pop, often that user will be shown Motely’s latest video about the subgenre, even if they don’t follow him.
This constant creator discovery allows fledgling music curators to build a quick, loyal audience on TikTok, perhaps easier than any other app. That’s what happened for Motely’s account “Mostley Music” which swelled to 231K followers for recommending “everything from indie pop to hip-hop,” as he says in his characteristic tagline. Hawkins’ account, called “Pablo the Don,” also quickly amassed a following. Now at 222.5K followers, Hawkins’ is known for telling it to you straight, whether that’s offering their opinion on music news or sharing songs from overlooked artists, often from marginalized communities.
Other curators who started building their accounts at the same time as Motely and Hawkins have come to own other niches as music curators. Jesea Lee, for example, gained a presence sharing his favorite rock, alt, and metal picks to the millennial and older Gen Z set, Carla Turi of “Carla’s Infinite Playlist” built her following by sharing her thoughtful playlists of indie rock, folk and acoustic songs to an audience of mostly women and LGBTQ+ viewers. Ari Elkins went for the everyman by suggesting tracks to fit relatable situations, rather than genres – like driving in the car with the windows down.
“It’s crazy how you can build something yourself and leapfrog these [early steps] in the music business,” Elkins says of building his TikTok account. “Now you don’t have to wait on anyone.” When he started out, he was a student at University of Michigan, working part time as a college rep for Warner. After focusing on widening his TikTok presence during quarantine, he’s now perhaps the biggest music curator on the app with 1.9 million followers and counting and has leveraged that following into a successful hosting career, including Spotify Live’s Soundtrack Your Day, Simon Cowell and TikTok’s Stem Drop, and various Live Nation events. Long term, he says he wants to be thought of as Gen Z’s Zane Lowe.
To William Gruger, global music programs for TikTok, these kinds of music curators are already this generation’s “new media personalities,” pointing out the similarities in cultural taste making between these creators on TikTok and VJs at the height of MTV’s reign.
Within a year of posting as Mostley Music, Motely found himself suddenly able to break into the industry which felt impenetrable to him just months earlier. Atlantic and Interscope/ Darkroom offered him A&R consultant gigs and Spotify tapped him as co-host of their Spotify Live show Lorem Life. And just a few months ago, Motely co-founded a label of his own. Called Music Soup, the record label provides expertise in digital marketing and was the first to use TikTok Sound On as a distributor. Motely says if it hadn’t been for building out Mostley Music during quarantine, he’d probably be working his way up slowly in the ranks from the assistant level of a record label – not founding his own at age 24.
Hawkins is still focusing on building their numbers on TikTok with the long term goal of being a major personality rather than an executive, but in 2021, their account led them to a full time gig on the social media team at United Masters which allows them better access to the industry and the ability to earn a steady wage from content creation.
Turi says curating Carla’s Infinite Playlist proved to be “absolutely instrumental” in landing her “dream” job as folk and acoustic curator at Spotify. “It gave me the credibility to have the position I’m in,” she says. Lee, who is now a DJ for SiriusXM Octane and works with events like Lollapalooza and When We Were Young, goes further to call building his TikTok music curation account “life changing.”
Some curators have slowed their use of the app – like Turi and Motely – after earning the highly-coveted industry roles, but others still make posting on TikTok to be a major priority. For those curators interested in more public-facing roles in music, maintaining their account can be instrumental to landing brand partnerships and paid hosting gigs off-platform.
No matter what they are doing with the app now, their ability to use TikTok as a career launchpad has proven that the app has further democratized not only which artists can succeed but also who can become an industry tastemaker.
“I wasn’t born into this business,” Hawkins says. “So I had to find my own way in. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, but now I have even bigger goals for the future.”
As 2022 comes to a close, the music business can look back on another hectic year: turnover at the top levels of several big companies; record-breaking successes in several sectors of the industry; and some major headlines coming from sometimes unexpected places, all of which captured the attention of the music business over the past nearly 12 months. Here are 10 big stories and trends that helped define the year in the industry.
The Executive Turntable
The end of the year is always time for turnover, and the final stretch of 2022 has seen more of that than usual. The biggest story of all, however, is a change atop the Warner Music Group, with Stephen Cooper exiting after a successful 11-year run that saw the major double its revenue and boost its market share while taking the company public once again. He’ll be replaced by YouTube’s Robert Kyncl in February, in a move that has been widely seen as a nod toward the tech-based present and future of the music biz, particularly at WMG. Though changes atop the major groups are relatively rare, that was far from the only transition this year: Def Jam, Island and Capitol all welcomed new chairmen/CEOs, with Tunji Balogun, the duo of Justin Eshak and Imran Majid and Michelle Jubelirer taking over the trio of UMG companies, respectively. John Esposito also is transitioning into a new chairman emeritus role at Warner Music Nashville, handing the day-to-day reins to his longtime heirs apparent Ben Kline and Cris Lacy, who will take over in January. Warner also integrated 300 Entertainment into the 300 Elektra Entertainment Group, with Kevin Liles in charge, then placed it under the umbrella of the newly-formed Atlantic Music Group, with Julie Greenwald at the helm. And just recently, Motown chairman/CEO Ethiopia Habtemariam surprised many in the industry by announcing her intention to step down, at a time when the label is in its best shape in years, with a successor yet to be named. The C-Suites have been spinning much more than usual this year.
The Ticketmaster-Taylor Swift Meltdown
Cross Taylor Swift, and her fans, at your peril. The biggest artist in the world, whose latest album Midnights easily cleared the biggest streaming week globally of 2022, had set a presale for her first tour in five years, with tickets slated to become available on Nov. 15 through Ticketmaster. But the company badly, and somewhat inexplicably, misjudged the level of demand that existed for Swift’s tour. Long wait times, astronomical prices and service outages tanked the pre-sale, with billions of bots, according to the company, flooding the site and resulting in 3.5 billion requests to access it — four times the previous high water mark. That resulted in millions of frustrated, ticket-less fans. Which would have been bad enough, if it didn’t spark a firestorm that has yet to abate and is showing no signs of doing so. (As Billboard’s Glenn Peoples wrote, “Ticketmaster is one of the few non-partisan issues in America in 2022.”) There is now a Justice Department investigation into whether Live Nation has abused its market share in the live business (which was said to pre-date the Taylor tour, though it came to light in the wake of the problem) and a Senate antitrust panel hearing on the docket, as well as several state-level probes, and a lawsuit from more than two dozen fans accusing the company of fraud and “anticompetitive conduct.” It’s unclear if changes are on the horizon, but it has proven a headache of massive proportions.
Top-Level Touring Success
The headlines have never been rosier: Live Nation and Ticketmaster reported record-breaking quarters. Bad Bunny’s World’s Hottest Tour became the first ever to average a $10 million gross per show. Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour closed in on the record for highest-grossing tour of all time. In short, it was a great year to be in the live music business — if you’re one of the biggest artists or promoters in the world. For a lot of others, the outlook was much less rosy: a “nightmare” of supply chain issues, COVID-related cancellations and postponements, rising costs and routing difficulties all combined to make it much more difficult for a lot of artists to get back out on the road this year. It is, and will continue to be, a process to get back to normal.
Synchs On Fire
A well-placed synch has always been a big revenue driver, particularly for legacy acts, but this past year the combination of prestige television and the TikTok algorithm combined to super-charge some of the biggest synchs to not just big bucks, but new chart highs, too. This past year, the biggest story on this front was Kate Bush’s 1985 track “Running Up That Hill,” which received a high-profile synch in Stranger Things and simply took off, surging into the top five of the Hot 100, becoming the oldest song to reach No. 1 on the Streaming Songs chart and returning to the top 10 of the Alternative Airplay chart after a record 28-year absence, while doubling its label revenue in the first two weeks after the series aired. And that wasn’t even the only Stranger Things-related synch to blow up: Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” ballooned 400% in streams in the days after its synch in the season finale. Songs featured in Euphoria, The Batman and Thor exploded in value, while the RIAA’s midyear report saw synch revenue growing faster than ever. Most recently, The Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck,” with a placement in Netflix’s Wednesday, saw its revenue grow more than 8,000% in a single week.
Ebbs and Flows of Catalog Market
The red-hot catalog market has been the talk of the business for almost half a decade at this point, but over the past year things started to change in some unexpected ways due to rising interest rates, the dwindling number of truly elite catalogs available and the faltering of some of the sector’s most prominent players. And still there were big wins, including Sting’s deal with UMPG that Billboard estimated could be worth well north of $300 million, Stephen Stills’ sale of a controlling interest in over 1,000 songs to Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists Group and UMG’s purchase of Frank Zappa’s catalog in the region of $30 million. Meanwhile, Brookfield dropped $2 billion into Primary Wave, which promptly acquired the catalogs of Joey Ramone ($10 million) and Huey Lewis & the News ($20 million). Concord swung a package deal for the Genesis catalog as well as those of its individual members for somewhere around $350 million, and new players like Litmus Music came into the market with $500 million to spread around (some of which just went towards Keith Urban’s master recordings). So despite a “challenging environment” and an end to the catalog “feeding frenzy,” there’s still a lot of juice left in those old songs (and a big Pink Floyd-sized catalog potentially in the offing).
The Rush Toward Services
While one sector of the business is running with arms wide open toward catalog ownership, another sector is running just as firmly in the opposite direction: toward services, or partnering with artists and labels to provide a backbone of support to help them achieve their goals without giving up ownership through distribution, marketing, publicity, promotions, royalty claiming and other services. The independent distribution space has generally been a viable business model for decades, but the rush into services ramped up in the past year. Companies like SoundCloud, TikTok, Tencent and Downtown embraced the shift with realigned business models, joining relatively new entrants to the space like UnitedMasters, Stem and Utopia. Many of the major labels (Interscope, Republic, 300) also launched their own distro subsidiaries in an attempt to grow their market share in an increasingly indie world. For some, however, the shift was less of a slam dunk than they may have envisioned, with a tough business model that relies on scale colliding with the increasingly-murky corners of the digital music industry –resulting in fraud, financial challenges and lukewarm responses from the market.
The Onset of Crypto Winter
Early in the year, Web3 projects exploded in what seemed like every sector of the music business, including all three major labels along with companies like Spotify, Coachella, Ticketmaster, Gibson, the Grammys and Death Row Records — not to mention artists like Snoop Dogg, Steve Aoki, Pharrell and Keith Richards. Universal launched an NFT band, Warner partnered with a slew of web3 companies, Snoop promised to buy Death Row and make it into an NFT record label; the possibilities seemed endless. But the seas proved to be much choppier than many had expected, and a series of selloffs and financial failures (as well as recession and inflation fears) brought in what many called the Crypto Winter, with sales and enthusiasm beginning to ebb as the year went on. By the time the second-biggest crypto exchange, FTX, spectacularly failed in November, there had been a 70%-80% cool-off in the market, to the point where the once-ubiquitous format seemed ready for another hibernation while the industry tries to figure out how best to take advantage of the new-ish technology. Expect the ebbs and flows to continue until we’re all in an acronym haze.
BTS Break Rattles Biz — And HYBE Stock
By just about any metric, BTS has been one of the biggest and most formidable acts of any genre in the past several years, racking up No. 1 hits, big-name collaborations, massive box office grosses and accounting for nearly one-third of the entire K-pop market in the U.S. since 2021, according to Luminate. So the group’s decision to take some time off for solo projects was a blow to the group’s management company, label and agency HYBE, which saw its stock, already down 45% for the year at that point, sink 27% in the week after the announcement. (Shares recovered a bit after closing at 145,000 won following the announcement, hitting a low of 107,000 on Oct. 13 and rebounding to 157,000 as of Dec. 12.) With the group members facing the prospect of mandatory service in the South Korean military, HYBE is facing an uncertain outlook for 2023, despite third-quarter growth and the possibility of positive returns from BTS members’ solo projects. For K-pop fans, however, there is room for other companies to step in: JYP Entertainment has had chart success with TWICE and Stray Kids multiple times this year, SM Entertainment’s BLACKPINK scored a No. 1 album in October and Big Hit Entertainment has generated success with Tomorrow X Together. While there’s plenty of opportunity in the K-pop market, the road ahead is uncertain for HYBE, a company that not too long again was a slam dunk.
Despite Complications, the Business is Thriving
It’s been a complicated year for the business overall, as the return from COVID has been trickier than expected, breaking new artists has become harder than ever and overarching financial issues like inflation and the possibility of a recession have cooled what had been a white-hot market. But despite those challenges, the music business has been growing on almost all fronts for another year. The touring business has already been covered here, but the U.S. recorded music business also saw on-demand audio streams surpass 1 trillion for the first time ever — representing a 611% increase from 2015, according to Luminate. Despite supply chain issues that continue to bedevil labels and manufacturers, vinyl sales passed $1 billion in revenue for the first time since the mid-1980s. At the midyear mark, they were up more than 22% — well before Taylor Swift’s Midnights set the record for largest vinyl sales week since Luminate began tracking data in 1991. Overall consumption is up another 9.2% year over year so far in 2022, with no signs of slowing down and with record companies increasing their guidance for investors in 2023. Amid cutbacks and hiring freezes in tech and media, the music business stil appears to be on strong footing.
It’s Still a TikTok World
Love it, hate it, rue its influence or spend hours scrolling it, the industry was as obsessed with TikTok in 2022 as it’s ever been, and the ByteDance-owned social streaming behemoth has leaned further than ever into its connections to the music biz — for better or worse, depending on whom you ask. The service has been behind the massive success of hits both old (Kate Bush’s “Running Up that Hill,” Frank Ocean’s “Lost”) and new (Lizzo’s “About Damn Time,” Bebe Rexha and David Guetta’s “I’m Good”) while helping break new artists like Em Beihold and Cafuné. But the labels’ love affair with TikTok has, over the past year, cooled down, as breaking a hit has become more complicated and the marketing pluses that it offered have fizzled. A distribution play from the platform called SoundOn was met with a lukewarm response, while a ByteDance streaming service, Resso, has rolled out in select markets, with rumors that it could come to the U.S. soon — if TikTok can ease the concerns of U.S. officials. And that comes as the frustration over low payouts and song leaks have some executives warning of a repeat of the early days of MTV and YouTube, when music content was regularly used to promote a fledgling service without commensurate compensation. Still, the biggest song on the platform in 2022 — a nine-year-old track from Swedish sad boy Yung Lean — grew its stream count by over 1,000%, and TikTok is still the single biggest proving ground for singles in the current digital climate. What to make of TikTok in 2022? How about…everything?
Not long ago, a placement on Spotify’s RapCaviar or Apple Music’s Today’s Hits playlists could ignite a single’s streaming numbers overnight. “Today’s Top Hits [32 million followers on Spotify] used to be the holy grail,” says one manager of several major-label acts. “Or even Pop Rising [2.7 million] — it was like, ‘If a song got on Pop Rising, it’s going to get to Today’s Top Hits and do 5 million streams a week.’ ”
But in 2022, the manager continues, “it doesn’t feel like that’s the case.” This realization is growing around the music industry. “The Spotify and Apple editorial playlists don’t have as much punch” as they did, agrees Kieron Donoghue, founder of Humble Angel Records and former vp of global playlists strategy at Warner Music Group. “The major streaming platforms are reacting to culture now rather than driving it,” adds Tatiana Cirisano, music industry analyst and consultant for MIDiA Research.
In a statement to Billboard, Sulinna Ong, global head of editorial at Spotify, countered that the platform’s “top five editorial playlists are followed by more than 80 million listeners — they’re wildly popular.” She added that the overall audience for playlists is larger than ever, “these listeners have increasingly diverse tastes, Spotify is meeting that consumer demand, and, as a result, more artists are being discovered.” A representative for Apple Music declined to comment for this story.
But managers sound nearly misty-eyed when they reminisce about the streams that some editorial playlists once generated. “There used to be a world where an unknown artist would get the cover of the Fresh Finds playlist [on Spotify] and they would get between 60,000 and 100,000 streams a week,” says one manager who works primarily with developing acts. “Now you’re looking at more like 15,000 to 20,000 streams a week.”
“Does Today’s Top Hits move the needle as much now as it did four years ago?” one senior label executive asks. “No.” The difference is especially stark, he adds, if you’re not near the top of the playlist.
Label executives say the change in firepower of marquee editorial playlists is caused in part by the increased emphasis on personalization, especially at Spotify, which encourages users to play music similar to what they’ve streamed — in essence, burrow deeper into their own tastes — rather than pushing all listeners to play the same tracks. The shift is also a reflection of the growing power of apps like TikTok in music discovery: “The pie of ‘discovery market share’ has become more fragmented,” according to Daniel Sander, chief commercial officer of music marketing technology company Feature.FM. The gatekeepers who program editorial playlists are ceding ground to user-generated content on short-form-video platforms.
There are exceptions: Managers say some of Spotify’s editorial playlists in Southeast Asia, for example, still have oomph, as does the phonk playlist, which launched earlier this year and caters to a rising subgenre of dance music popular in Eastern Europe. (Beneficiaries include dhruv, who has 7.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and Kordhell, with 12.7 million.) But executives maintain that many of the big-name editorial collections are not magnifying songs the way they once did.
Some of that decline is due to changes at the streaming services. In 2019, Spotify took playlists 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 playlists like RapCaviar, Baila Reggaeton, and Today’s Top Hits.)
Spotify found that this had two effects: Listeners tuned in to personalized collections for longer, and 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 one 2021 announcement.
In her statement, Spotify’s Ong noted that “listener habits have become increasingly diverse, so our playlist strategy has expanded to accommodate that.” She says personalized editorial playlists are responsible for “a third of all new artist discoveries on Spotify.”
TikTok, which now spurs a lot of music discovery, embraced personalization from the beginning. Users marvel at how well the app seems to anticipate their tastes: “Everything on TikTok feels like it was meant especially for you,” says one music executive.
Short-form-video platforms like TikTok have also fundamentally altered the timeline of a hit. “With the rise of TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, artists can play song snippets or behind-the-scenes content and drive fans to take action — discovery is happening before your song would even be able to be put on an editorial playlist,” says Sander.
In addition, TikTok rejuvenates catalog tracks — ranging from Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” (released in 1977) to Thundercat’s “Them Changes” (2017) — and pushes them back on to the charts, defying many marquee editorial playlists’ emphasis on front-line releases. “The path of a hit has changed,” says one major-label executive. The major streaming platforms “haven’t built anything to adjust to that.”
As a result, the power of streaming-service gatekeepers has eroded. “You’re going to find the next curator on TikTok,” says one A&R consultant at a major label. The mantle of the editorial playlisters has been taken up partly by remix-focused accounts on TikTok, which release sped-up or slowed-down versions of sounds that millions of users incorporate into their own videos.
User-generated content is “what’s driving TikTok and driving the charts,” says Kuok Meng Ru, CEO of music technology company BandLab. “People feeling involved gets them more excited.”
And there’s no way to be involved with editorial playlists other than hitting the “like” button. “We’re seeing in consumer surveys how much Gen Z really does want to actively participate in music — not just listen and consume passively, but make their own videos, remix the song, create their own content on top of it,” Cirisano adds. “The major streaming services don’t offer that.”
Everyone has good and bad qualities, but Sky Katz is embracing her dark side in her angsty new single, “P.O.S.,” which officially dropped on Friday (Dec. 9).
“Probably got anger issues, major anxiety / I’m a manipulative, under-stimulated teen / Over opinionated, I got nothing to say / Maybe I’m just a piece of s—, but baby, that’s OK,” the 17-year-old sings in the chorus, which takes on a more pop-punk sound in the same vein as Katz’s recent singles, “Why Did You Call?” and “Breakup Song,” the latter of which was co-written and produced by Good Charlotte‘s Joel Madden.
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“‘P.O.S.’ is a song about owning the shittiest qualities within yourself,” Katz shared with Billboard in a press statement. “We present such polished, perfected versions of ourselves to the world, but this is a song to take a break from that and just have fun exaggerating/embracing your flaws for a little.”
The release comes just days before Katz takes the stage at New York City’s The Mercury Lounge on December 13 in celebration of her 18th birthday. “I purposely scheduled my concert a day after my birthday so I can celebrate with some people who make me feel most loved – my fans,” she told Billboard. “There’s going to be a lively contagious energy in the room which I can’t wait to present. With Silver Cup opening and me performing after, I know we’ll start and end the night on a great note!”
Listen to Katz’ ‘P.O.S.’ below, and grab tickets to her upcoming NYC show here.
In early 2020, Kimberly Loaiza uploaded her very first TikTok video to promote her single “No seas celoso,” which loosely translates to “don’t be jealous.” The 15-second video features the Mexican pop star doing a short and simple choreography to her song with a request to her followers: “Loves, if you want to see me post more often here, I invite you to do the #noseascelosochallenge.” Since, that clip has earned more than 3 million likes, and the singer has continued to post religiously, growing a zealous fanbase on the short-form video platform. This year, according to TikTok’s recently released year-end report, Loaiza was the app’s most-viewed music artist globally.
At a time when the music business is obsessed with TikTok and nearly every hit song must take off there to thrive elsewhere, Loaiza has built a following of 70 million followers — up 16% from the year prior — and 4 billion likes on her account. Key to the 24-year-old’s growth on TikTok has been her collaborating with other influencers in her videos, as well as connecting with fans through popular trends like viral dance challenges and video reactions. Of course, she’s also using TikTok as a platform to grow her music career, which already includes key collaborations with artists such as Grupo Firme. Her top five tracks this year on the app are “Devoto” with Elvis de Yongol (657,500 videos on the app), “Apaga la luz” with Ovy on the Drums (525,000 videos), “No seas celoso” (276,000 videos), “Mejor Sola” with Zion y Lennox (274,000 videos), and “Me perdiste” (221,000 videos).
“TikTok allows the use of music for the creation of content,” Loaiza’s manager, Leonardo de la O Crovi, tells Billboard. “The basis of everything is to constantly form work teams that adapt to the new ways of communicating. That’s where we try to get the most out of it with good, original and creative ideas. The platform undoubtedly enhances the songs and gives artists an opportunity to grow.”
“This shows the growth opportunity that exists when an artist and her team work together with the TikTok team to generate creative strategies that result in the growth that the artist seeks,” adds Rob Ruiz, music operations lead for Mexico at TikTok.
Additionally, Loaiza has established many new business relationships including with Loud And Live, which will bring her Bye Bye Tour to the U.S. for the first time in 2023. It also marks the last tour where she and her husband JD Pantoja, who’s also a recording artist and popular social media personality, will share the stage.
“You can expect many beautiful things, many good things,” Loaiza assures. “You can expect a great show because that’s what we want to give our fans. We want to give them a truly unforgettable show that they go and say, ‘Wow, it was all worth it.’”
Below, Loaiza talks about being the number one most-viewed artist globally on TikTok, how that’s helped her music career, and more.
You’re ending the year as the most-viewed artist globally on TikTok. What has contributed to your major success on the app?
I sincerely believe that the potion for success is to be constant, to fight for your dreams, remove the barriers that you have in your mind, and do what you really like. When you mix all that together I really feel that you make something explode and everything that you propose yourself to will work out in the end.
What makes Kim Loaiza stand out from the crowd where more than 70 million followers are connecting with your content?
I think I’m super transparent with the people who follow me. I’m always trying to give them the best possible content, always aware of what they want, and always reading their comments. I think that’s what makes my fans connect the most with me because I’m 100% transparent and I like to pamper them and give them the content they ask of me.
Beyond being a famed TikTok personality, how do you feel the app has propelled your very own music career?
It’s helped a lot because my music is uploaded to the app and gets exposure. Either I make a dance challenge for it or fans create one, and it goes viral. You learn the trend, you learn the song. That’s what’s helped my musical career a lot and I really love it.
Your husband JD Pantoja is also on the list with you. What does being a TikTok Power Couple mean?
It feels super nice to share this achievement as a couple because I know everything he has gone through, I know everything he has lived through to get to where he is. I was with him from the very start. I recorded his first Vine videos and helped him with his social media. To see that now we have a very different lifestyle from the one we had a few years ago is crazy. All the support we receive from fans feels beautiful, and well, the truth is, I am super proud of everything my husband has achieved.
Welcome to Billboard Pro’s Trending Up newsletter, where we take a closer look at the songs, artists, curiosities and trends that have caught the music industry’s attention. Some have come out of nowhere, others have taken months to catch on, and all of them could become ubiquitous in the blink of a TikTok clip. This week: A Lady Gaga deep cut goes viral thanks to Netflix’s Wednesday — despite not being featured in the show — while a star trio’s ’00s R&B cover gets a big bump for the original, and Snoop Dogg does it for the kids.
Lady Gaga’s “Bloody Mary” Soars Over 400% in Streams Thanks to ‘Wednesday’
The streaming gains of The Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck,” as covered in Trending Up last week, make perfect sense: the spooky-punk classic was used in a school dance sequence in Netflix’s smash new Addams Family revival Wednesday. With millions binging the show following its Nov. 23 premiere, “Goo Goo Muck” naturally received a healthy streaming bump by viewers eager to listen to the song that soundtracked Jenna Ortega’s limb-throwing dance moves.
Yet that school dance sequence is also helping Lady Gaga’s “Bloody Mary” make major moves… and Gaga’s Born This Way track (released on Interscope in 2011) isn’t even featured in Wednesday. Instead, TikTok users have figured out that speeding up “Bloody Mary” makes the electro-pop track synch perfectly with Wednesday’s off-kilter choreography, and are producing and liking hundreds of “Bloody Mary”/Wednesday clips as a result.
“Bloody Mary,” which was never released as a single from Born This Way, is up 415% in weekly U.S. on-demand streams for the week ending Dec. 1, cracking 2 million plays in that time frame, according to Luminate. “Slay Wednesday!” Mother Monster wrote on Twitter last Thursday (Dec. 1) to acknowledge the trend. “You’re welcome at Haus of Gaga anytime (and bring Thing with you, we love paws around here).” At the end of a year where TV and movie soundtrack hits were louder than ever on TikTok, it’s only fitting that we get a soundtrack hit fully born on the platform. – JASON LIPSHUTZ
The Weeknd & Metro Boomin Fans Can’t Keep Their “I Don’t Wanna Know” Listening on the Low
It might’ve been re-titled “Creepin’,” but any fan of ‘00s pop or R&B knew what the deal was by the end of The Weeknd’s first line. The song, taken from star producer Metro Boomin’s new Boominati Worldwide/Republic set Heroes & Villains, is a cover in all but name of Mario Winans’ cheated-on classic “I Don’t Wanna Know” (from his 2004 album Hurt No More on Bad Boy/Universal) with rap’s late-year-MVP 21 Savage handling the guest verse duties that belonged to Diddy on the original. Featured as the lead track on Spotify’s most recent New Music Friday playlist, “Creepin’” was one of the best-performing tracks on streaming over the weekend, and is currently leading the daily charts for both Spotify and Apple Music.
We’ll see next week what kind of early chances “Creepin’” has of matching or exceeding the chart heights of “I Don’t Wanna Know,” which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2004. But in the meantime, some of its streaming success has also spilled over to the song’s predecessor: Its daily official on-demand U.S. stream count rose from just under 50,000 on Dec. 1 (the day before “Creepin’”) to over 157,000 on Dec. 3 – a gain of 215%, according to Luminate. – ANDREW UNTERBERGER
Raye Resets, Scores a Fast-Moving Viral Hit
“A little context, if you care to listen/ I find myself in a s–t position,” Raye sings early in her new single “Escapism,” featuring 070 Shake; the British pop artist is singing about an unexpected breakup and the drowning-of-sorrows that will follow, but Raye also found herself in a sticky situation last year when she publicly claimed that her label, Polydor Records, was refusing to release her long-completed debut album.
Now, Raye has a new deal with Human Re Sources/The Orchard, and a viral hit with “Escapism,” which has gotten the sped-up TikTok treatment and taken off as the soundtrack to various lip-syncs and rap-alongs following its Nov. 11 release. “Escapism” earned nearly 2 million U.S. on-demand streams in the week ending Dec. 1, according to Luminate – a 300% gain from the previous week. Raye has been featured on dance hits by David Guetta, Jax Jones and Major Lazer, but she may be entering 2023 with a fresh start and a hit as a lead artist – the opposite of a s–t situation, really. – JL
“Affirmation”s With Snoop Becomes a Surprise TikTok Trend
If you’ve ever felt like you needed some motivational pep talk from Tha Doggfather, it’s been quite the last couple weeks for you on TikTok, where the Snoop Dogg-fronted kids’ music project Doggyland has been taking off lately. “Affirmation Song” has been the biggest breakout track from its independently released Kids Hits, Vol. 1 project, with thousands of vid eos – most from adults, clearly still in need of a little positive reinforcement – being soundtracked by Snoop leading a chorus of kids in a series of the titular chants (“There is no one better to be but myself! Today is gonna be an amazing day!”) The song’s streaming performance has gotten an accompanying self-esteem boost, spiking 272% in official on-demand U.S. streams to 269,000 for the week ending Dec. 1, according to Luminate, and undoubtedly raising some label eyebrows about what other artists might be able to get into the viral kids’ music game. – AU
Q&A: Stephen Brower, Global Co-Lead of Artist Relations at Amazon Music, on What’s Trending Up in His World
What was the process for programming this year’s lineup of Amazon Original and cover holiday songs?
We always look to work with artists we know our Amazon Music customers love. Lizzo and Kane Brown have had massive success on Amazon Music, both throughout their careers and certainly with their 2022 album releases. Lauren Spencer-Smith is likewise an emerging artist that Amazon Music customers have been loving all year long. Working with each of them to find a holiday song that we thought holiday listeners on Amazon Music would discover and love was a fun process, and one we think will delight their fans on Amazon Music.
We also look to work with artists across different genres and styles of holiday music. If you’re an R&B fan, there’s an amazing Giveon Amazon Original for you to discover. If you love classical holiday music, Alexis Ffrench has delivered a beautiful song for you.
What have you noticed in terms of how Amazon Music users are interacting with holiday music in 2022 as opposed to previous years?
Our customers have found these new holiday Amazon Originals early this year, and certainly seem to be responding to these songs. We’re already seeing Originals on the Holiday 100, with Lauren Spencer-Smith at No. 51, Lizzo at No. 54 and Kane Brown at No. 58 on the chart. Both Lizzo and Lauren Spencer-Smith debuted on the Hot 100 this week, and Lizzo’s track is currently at No. 52 on the Official Charts (UK) Top 100 this week. That these songs are only available on Amazon Music — and are doing so well so early in December — shows how excited our customers are about holiday music and about these new Amazon Originals.
Every year, several artists try to launch new holiday songs as well as covers of classics, with only a few cutting through the clutter. What do you think is the biggest key to a successful new holiday song?
The beauty of holiday music, but also one of its challenges, is that having a holiday hit is really a long-term proposition. These songs only have a brief window of time to catch the public’s ear, but they have that window every year. Our 2018 Amazon Original from Katy Perry, “Cozy Little Christmas,” was certified platinum earlier this year, and now feels like one of those songs listeners are going to look for every year. I think something similar is happening with Carrie Underwood’s Amazon Original song “Favorite Time of Year” from 2020. Those songs have that magic quality of being both nostalgic and contemporary at the same time, which I think will be key to their timelessness.
With artists with whom we work to create new cover versions of classic tracks, I think a key is having something distinctive so that their new version can sit alongside an original or iconic version and not compete with it. Last year, Camila Cabello’s Amazon Original version of “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” featured mariachi flourishes that felt totally authentic to her, and also gave her version something listeners would seek out alongside other versions of that song. This year, Lauren Spencer-Smith’s take on “Last Christmas” is as an emotional ballad, which gives a totally different feel than Wham!’s iconic version.
Fill in the blank: the biggest new trend in holiday music over the next few years will be _______.
Holiday versions of songs that aren’t otherwise tied to the season. In the U.K., Stormzy has released an Amazon Original holiday version of his current single “Firebabe” that customers are loving. We did something similar last year with the Amazon Original holiday version of Coi Leray’s viral smash “Twinnem.” I love both of those and think they really offer something unique to fans alongside songs that are more explicitly “holiday,” thematically. – JL
Seasons Gainings: Happy “Heather” Day
In between cleaning up from Thanksgiving and starting to hang your holiday decorations, did you make time to celebrate “Heather” Day? Maybe not, but plenty of Conan Gray fans surely did, with “Heather Day” trending all across social media on Dec. 3 – thanks to the date being mentioned in the 2020 hit ballad’s opening lyrics, “I still remember, the third of December, me in your sweater…” Plenty of commemorating took place across streaming services as well, with “Heather” (from Gray’s Republic-released Kid Krow album) rising 92% in daily official on-demand U.S. streams to over 914,000 on Dec. 3, according to Luminate – enough for the song to re-enter the Spotify Daily Top Songs USA chart at No. 62. – AU