Awareness is the essence of discovery. Pre Spotify, Radio & TV was the critical tool to get you noticed in the old music economy. Sure, there was touring, and of course, some magazines and hanging with already famous artists were helping too. The key, however, was Radio and TV. Radio Stations would repeat your song until people had built an emotional connection with your song, strong enough to go and buy it. TV reached a hugely focused market, and if the performance connected, you would have a hit the next day—millions of people watching the same program and listen to the same song simultaneously. People connect on similarities. And of course, there was MTV which had a decent enough reach and high rotations to build familiarity too. However, it was tough to get on to these platforms, and only signed artists had any chance to gain mass exposure this way.
Today those things are gone or in-effective. So how do you get to build decent familiarity? Let's do some math.
For example, Let's take a play on the BBC Radio 1 morning show in the old economy and another 12 plays that same week on rotation. Your song would probably reach somewhat 15 million listeners in that week. Although we may call them passive listeners, the likelihood that this converts into sales at a significant number was very high. A 6-week rotation could generate 80-90% familiarity with the station's audience.
Now compare that with the new economy. How will you reach 15 million unique listeners in the UK? Let's say you're lucky enough to be on a bunch of massive Spotify playlists. Let's say you're on a playlist with 1 Mio followers, and you're somewhere between position 20 and 30. On average, in a week, this will mean that about 25,000 listeners will have played your song at least passively. A playlist stream is the closest as we can come to an old economy radio play. To reach 15 million people with your song, you need massive playlist support.
As I am writing this, Drake's new song "What's Next" is position two on Spotify's global chart with 28 million streams in a week. However, the playlist reach for that song is only 8.6 million, hardly enough to generate 28 million streams in a week. The streams are not coming from TikTok either, with just 8k videos using the song at this time. This song dropped on March 5, so the streams are likely from 53 million followers and algorithmic playlists. So while this looks like it could match an R1 playlist in the old economy, it probably doesn't. These are global streams. In the UK, in the same time frame, Spotify streamed the song 1.6 million times. Even accounting for other platforms in the UK and adding another 1.6 million, we're not getting close to mirroring a week of R1 old economy plays. With 22,000 global views per hour for "What's Next," Youtube will not make much difference either. Drake's global fan base is driving the streams.
Let's go from Drakes' 53 million Spotify followers to the Masked Wolf with 106,000 Spotify followers. His re-release "Astronaut In The Ocean" is number 7 globally with 23 million streams in the past week. This song's playlist reach is 128 million, and the number of TikTok videos is just under 1 million.
The song dropped on January 6.
We know that a playlist with one million followers and a song with an average position, say between 20 and 30, would deliver 25k listeners and potential 32k streams in a week, so 128 million playlist reach will roughly deliver 3.3 million streams in a week. Still not enough to account for the 23 million. Here comes TikTok. The 1 million videos would have likely delivered a total reach of at least 1 billion passive listens. Around half a billion passive TikTok views would drive enough traffic to generate the missing streams in that particular week. A good number of the TikTok posts using the song are "Dark Broadcasts," i.e., 'one to many" posts by accounts with millions of followers.
In the end, I can't determine which of these streams are passive or active, but you can see what it takes to reach a few million people's ears in a week now without having the old economic power of radio. Even more important, what we see with Masked Wolf is based on a global audience. A Radio 1 rotation would affect a concentrated single market, hence creating massive UK stars. Markets are highly fragmented now. Radio has its own "tune-in" challenges, and consumers who don't use specific social platforms are not discovering new music. And while there is a powerful discovery element on the streaming platforms, most songs are still left out and rely entirely on pull streams (people actively selecting a song) rather than push streams (playlists).
Over the next few installments of this newsletter, we will look into how we generate pull streams and build familiarity without a lucky win on TikTok or playlist love from the DSPs. So get ready, because luck favors the prepared.