We need a new top chart!

I’m utterly tired of explaining to idiots that you have millions of streams doesn’t make you a star, or even successful. In the old days, the counting of sales was a good measurement of how popular you were. That is NOT the same as streams. Streams can be anything. A bought physical thing is an action you must do and a lot of thresholds so in the end yes that can prove something. A stream is not even a person pressing a button it can be on a playlist that really no one is listening to is just a background in a store or even on a chine mobile farm. There is no investment from the fan in a stream. And that is why it can never prove any fanbase whatsoever.

So, bragging that you have a couple of million streams is stupid. If you want it to be more stupid those million streams are just on one platform.  The easiest trick is to compare an artist through different platforms. You want to get even more stupid those millions of streams were created before 2019 when you could easily cheat on several playlists.

The industry has left the counting of streams long ago. It only matters if it’s done organically. And that is very seldom that is done organically of the artists that have over a million streams.

No, I’m really fed up with that the media are claiming something just because an artist has millions of streams. It’s not comparable with a million of sales.  The headlines are, “Popular artist done something” and then in the text it says that the artist has millions of streams on Spotify. Well, millions of streams together with all songs. Still the artist has never toured played live or even sold any merch. In fact, I have a hard time even call it an artist. It’s like calling anyone that happens to get a clip viral a movie star.

What we need is a system that also looks on the live side, ticket sales, how many radio plays, all streams from all platforms (to many just looks on that they have millions of streams on Spotify, then they just have a thousand on Youtube and how many do you have on Tiktok?). It all must count in to get a better picture of what is popular. What does the audience really care about? I know there are some out there but they are not good enough and just number crunching from bad sources that can be manipulated. We need something really better.

I know there are several companies working on this right now. My question is though how long it will take us to erase the whole damn conception that a stream is not a sale and that social media is more a filter bubble and nothing that proves that much. So even if that correct top list comes what kind of impact will it have and how threatened will the labels be if they can’t manipulate that chart?

Problems that we deal with later, first we just need another measurement and top chart before we get totally overloaded with a nonsense artist that claim their fame for nothing.

The world of empty streams sounds metallic!

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.