Just saw a friend
posted about a local band being signed to a bigger festival organizer. Never
heard about the band before so I was a bit curious. I had heard about their former
band though. It was one of the metal bands that was doing things very fast and
very costly until they crashed after a couple of years.
So, they
reformed and changed name. Also, that kind of a stupid mistake but usually the aftermath
of an emotional poor decision.
Anyway, I
saw that they were picked up by the only metal label left in Sweden. Usually, people
brag around that but this label even though they are owned by a major is
counted as a small shit label with no power whatsoever. And since I haven’t heard
a shit around the project, I was a bit puzzled. Why brag and share this shit? As
usual, I just went into Spotify and checked the numbers.
Pretty good
numbers, to good numbers to be unknown like that. Most songs were between 500 000
to 300 000 each. But they only had 10 000 monthly listeners. Also,
they only had 5000 followers. Something strange here.
So, as it
is right now you just check the next outlet. YouTube, I mean here is where all
the kids are and where most of the development of labels are done for the
moment. And here we go not a video over
25 000 streams. Most just with a just over 100 streams.
Back to
Spotify and you can see how they are playlisted by this small company on
totally useless metal playlists to get numbers. Empty streams that have no real
value. I would love to know who the stupid festival organizer is that took on
the band. They are in for a nasty surprise when then band maybe only draw like
20 people for the festival.
Yes, the
industry in the lower regions is still pumped by these fake numbers. The
bigger section is sobering up. I’m surprised that bigger people are still falling
for these pumped-up fake numbers.
What the big
players are talking about is how many real fans you can draw live. The digital
numbers are totally irrelevant in the industry that is now developing. We are
talking real fans and how they can react on stuff. The funny part is that the
digital side is totally lost on this. The programmers and other digital gurus that
think that we still going to use computers to find the next band is damn too high
still. We are going back from digital to the real world and experience to save
the music industry. And we are leaving the world of empty bot streams behind in
the graveyard of myspace numbers.
I’m also
not surprised that it’s a metal band we are talking about. The biggest metal/hard
rock magazine in Sweden jus closed. And in this genre, they started late do
migrate to the new world and were laughing that they were rising in the sales
charts. They were not rising it was the charts that fell and adopted to their
low level.
Really agree with your assessment that streams do not always make for a live fan base, but also wanted to note that we've worked with artists to get them featured on playlists (that's our focus - you'd probably consider us one of those 'small companies'),and the band will then start to have fans show up at their shows saying they found them on a playlist on Spotify, that's why they are there. So it happens, we believe it all contributes, even the smaller playlists, it's all a build, they aren't all fake numbers. Just slow to develop, very misunderstood, and much less than we'd all like right now as we work in this space, believing that artists who never had a chance before do now, when they understand best practices and find and engage fans on the platforms as another tool to develop their careers. Playlisting is a fairly available way to help get things started (I agree it is def not the end all!).
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