Fans or just numbers?

 You know what, your song might not be a flop just because it doesn’t have any numbers. The numbers just show how much marketing that has been done. The numbers don’t tell you if the song is good or bad. The numbers just tell you how many people that started it, don’t even tell how long they spent the time to listen to the song.

We have a problem in the music industry because too many people believe that they can find the next thing by numbers. Not statistics, you can actually get info from statistics. Only information on things that have been not the future, yet. I have seen new programs that can predict a bit of how songs will perform in the future from the statistics, but just if nothing major happens.

The problem is the number crunching. People just go in on Spotify and see that wow this has 12 million listings and automatically think it is a hit. To be honest you can easily get those numbers with a crappy song and put it in the right channels to get the numbers. The problem is that the fans are not fans they are just people getting shot in a drive-by music shooting in the different digital outlets. A victim of that someone managed to fool the algorithm to place the song in front of you and you click on it just to listen the first 20 seconds and realize this is so bad I just want o turn it off. Switch the channel to something else and forget about the song. The problem is that mistake is now a figure in the listing’s statistics for that song. Another way to lure the algorithms to show it to another victim of bad music.

So now you think I will tell you that it was better before. Not really this has been this way too many years. Before this was done by blowing up your sales in cheating ways. An artist in Sweden for example sold his new single for one cent in the ice cream trucks. Then reported the sales. One way to cheat the algorithms. At the same time Virgin used housewives in the 70: s and the 80: s. Gave them money to go down to buy the records they wanted in the charts. The phenomena are not new in any way. The problem here is that now it’s so easy and cheap that every average joe can do it online suddenly it’s easier to cheat than actually having a real career.

The thing usually then was exposed when the artist went on tour. Suddenly even the most streamed artist in the world could only get 500 people to a show in a major city. A good marker was if an artist could draw an audience on a live show if they really had any fans or just numbers. Now during Covid this function is off. There are no measurements at all. There are no live shows and no real audience. This has never happened before and the reactions I see right now is very strange. Okey a lot more PR is done for each release. The cheating is mainly through the roof. At the same time, nothing new comes out from the noise. No new artists are on the horizon. It’s mainly the old that we already had and are trusted that gets any attention. If any the noise is so loud so even that AC/DC gave out a new single witch people never thought it would since members have died and so on. Still, the noise was so loud that they were drowned. It passed me I found out by mistake that there was a new single out.

I just looked at the numbers. The song has been out in a month and has just passed 6 million streams. That is what an average joe rapper from Hackensack can cheat up to in a week. Okey the song will climb on if it gets traction. But my guess is that if they manage to tour again the song will reach quite much. Like I wrote in the beginning it’s all about marketing, the problem right now is that the number one tool is shut down and we don’t know for how long.

One thing I will be thrilled to see is what happens when Covid is over and how will the live change the top lists.