Numbers on the Board (June 2024)
“Numbers on the Board” is a monthly column inspired by Walt Hickey’s Numlock News, adapting that format for the music business. A dive into the numbers headlining and defining stories of interest.
3:07 and 3:06 - The average length of songs on RapCaviar and Today’s Top Hits in June
As a part of this column, I’m starting up another spreadsheet experiment. A small anecdote before the numbers.
A few weeks ago, my 20 month old son started saying “yeah.” I realized after some days that his tiny “yeah”—pronounced more like “ee-yeah”—reminded me of something. After wracking my sleep-deprived brain, I realized it was Gunna’s 2023 hit “fukumean.” I had mostly ignored it when it came out. It played during my weekly basketball game and everything clicked.
“fukumean” is two minutes and three seconds long. It is one of roughly a half decade’s worth of hits clocking in under three minutes. The Washington Post, among many many others, has noted the declining length of hit songs over the years.
Source: Washington Post
Most studies of this phenomenon focus on Billboard, stalwart arbiter of musical success. While that might remain a meaningful data source, given the relation of streaming success to chart success in the current era, it will likely be better to go straight to two of the sources of sustained streams: Spotify’s flagship genre playlists RapCaviar and Today’s Top Hits.
For this little study, I’m tracking songs on the playlists as they update each week at “store turn” (the time when new music goes live on Friday at midnight EST / 9pm PST). Song length (plus a variety of other data) will be logged in this spreadsheet. The average song on each playlist was almost identical, with RapCaviar’s mean clocking in at three minutes and seven seconds and TTH’s coming in at three minutes and six seconds.
RapCaviar’s shortest song, fittingly, belonged to Gunna: “on one tonight,” one minute thirty-one seconds. Its longest was Drake’s “Family Matters,” a searing seven minutes and thirty-seven seconds that is present because it is a key piece of one of the highest profile rap beefs ever. The other two longest songs on RapCaviar also belong to this beef: Kendrick’s “Not Like Us” (four minutes and thirty-seven seconds) and “Euphoria” (six minutes and six seconds). Seven songs came in at or over four minutes, while three ran under two minutes. Today’s Top Hits sported three songs over four minutes, and no songs under two minutes (though three songs came close).
The shortest song on Today’s Top Hits is Lay Bankz’ viral “Tell Ur Girlfriend” (two minutes and four seconds). Though not a rap song strictly speaking, “Tell Ur Girlfriend” is R&B with firm roots in modern hip-hop production aesthetics and cadences. Two pure pop artists are responsible for the second and third shortest songs on the playlist (Tate McRae - “Greedy,” two minutes and eleven seconds; Charli XCX - “360,” two minutes and twelve seconds).
Notably, there is only one song on both playlists: “Not Like Us,” the now seemingly undeniable song of the summer.
I’ll update this tracking document on a weekly basis (with a hat tip to colleague Othello Van Veerdegem, who has helped keep a handle on this data). I may not report back until something interesting happens.
£1 Billion - Queen Sells Catalog to Sony
A favorite topic of this particular column continues in June.
Legendary rock band Queen is selling its catalog and all rights outside of live performance income to Sony for £1 billion (or roughly $1.27 billion if you were curious how their purchasing power would look in the US as opposed to the UK). That means publishing rights, master rights, and NIL (name, image, and likeness) rights all go to Sony. Undoubtedly for a group of this renown, some protections must remain in place to make sure that Sony doesn’t run roughshod over their legacy, but this is about as “kitchen sink” a sale as it gets, a fact embodied in an uncommonly gaudy bill of sale.
One interesting tidbit that points to the complexity of catalog deals of this scale is the jurisdiction of some, if not all, of the master recordings. Per Variety:
“The catalog, which has been in play for several years and inching toward Sony for the past few months, is complicated by the group’s recorded-music rights for the U.S. and Canada, which were acquired by Disney, for an undisclosed price, at some point in the 2000s after an initial $10 million licensing deal that was struck in 1991. Those rights will remain with Disney in perpetuity, although certain of the bandmembers’ remaining royalties from them will go to Sony once the deal closes. Similarly, the group’s distribution deal, which is currently with Universal, will go to Sony in all territories outside the U.S. and Canada when it expires in 2026 or 2027.”
When you read about catalog sale prices (or any deal prices, for that matter), you are often getting an incomplete picture of when money is paid out to the seller, how much is getting paid out at different intervals, and what circumstances might result in payments being delayed or disqualified. With a sale of this size, I would be shocked if Sony does not have some protections in place for underperformance or unexpected legal issues. That said, there are very few catalogs as venerable and likely well-vetted as Queen’s, few that have generated as much income and interest as theirs over the five decades of their popularity. The Disney and distribution wrinkles might mean that some chunks of the purchase price are not payable until the band members paying royalties to Sony render their first statements in association with the deal and the available distribution rights transfer from Universal to Sony. I am speculating, but any sale this big should invite speculation and conversation (much as Kevin Parker’s recent, nebulous deal with Sony did).
25 years - Anniversary of Napster
On June 1st, 1999, file-sharing service Napster launched.
In the two and a half decades since its rapid rise and precipitous fall, the name “Napster” has taken on mythic proportions.
It is shorthand for a file-sharing revolution that stretched far beyond a mere two years of operation, sparking a Cambrian explosion comprising services like Limewire, KaZaa, and Soulseek, and torrenting communities lik Oink.co.uk, what.cd, and the Pirate Bay.
It represents an internet awakening, the emergence of file sharing as a mainstream concept after years spent as the domain of hard core computer nerds and college kids with access to faster internet and IRC chat clients.
It is the music industry’s Babadook, a shadowy creature whose name reminds a certain generation of artists and executives that many years were spent wondering aloud if the music industry would survive in any form.
It is a symbol of maverick entrepreneurship, launching the career of Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, a goofy paragon of cavalier company stewardship immortalized by Justin Timberlake’s portrayal in Academy Award winning 2010 film The Social Network (the film that incidentally launched the scoring career of Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, an early proponent of free downloading as a mechanism for fan engagement).
It is the lightning rod that sparked the debate about recorded music’s value, one that has persisted since its launch. While Napster punctured the inflated retail prices forced on consumers in the late 90s, it also set an implicit expectation that music should be freely accessible. Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, and others have built multi-billion dollar valuations by exploiting this notion.
Though Napster alone did not undercut the CD-era music industry’s sense of invincibility, it does not feel like an exaggeration to say that it may be the single most important company of the last quarter century in music, with Spotify a close second. Napster cold-plunged the music business into the digital era, taking underground concepts to the public. After June 1999, a return to the old order became impossible. Certainly any sympathy for rights holders and record labels was destroyed by the legal actions taken by the RIAA against average civilians caught downloading. Metallica famously became the face of the anti-Napster movement, taking on a role as figureheads of a lawsuit against Napster that was denounced by many artists at the time and has only grown more preposterous with the clarity of years.
It is fitting that Napster’s 25 year anniversary comes smack in the middle of AI madness. In 2024, panic grips many who’ve made livings based on copyright regimes functioning in a specific, regular, exploitable way. The same conditions existed when Napster burst to into view, though distributive and promotional powers were far more concentrated then than they are now.
In 2019, I wrote about the unfulfilled potential of “piracy” as a promotional force, archival mechanism, and community builder in great detail. I will spare you a rehashing of how the major labels misunderstood and bungled their handling of the illegal downloading problem. I will only add that nearly three decades from Napster’s launch, freely available music on platforms like YouTube and TikTok forms the primary global mechanism for promotion and consumption, and the industry still has a hard time making sense of what its product should be, wagging fingers and forcing contractual standoffs to squeeze pennies more out of arrangements rooted in creaky notions of copyright-protected value.
A word from generative AI music start up Suno’s blog:
“We are very excited to announce that throughout the remainder of 2024, we will be paying a total of $1 million to these creators who are bringing us closer to music, and each other, with Suno. We are kicking things off with the Summer of Suno, a celebration of the songs that move us as a community — whether they make us bob our heads, tap our feet, laugh, cry or simply say ‘wow.’”
Suno’s summer of big numbers continues. Fresh off of raising $125 million, the company setting the tone for dubiously sourced generative music is offering up a total of $1 million in prize money to creators using their platform. I don’t have anything particularly clever to say about this competition, though it does feel like it either prefigures some sort of artificial intelligence American Idol or a version of the Hunger Games where we all have to enter musical prompts for the entertainment of our overlords, be they human or computer.
As the summer of Suno wears on, Suno and rival start-up Udio are being sued by all the major labels for copyright infringement, as felt fairly predictable last month. It is perhaps a bit too poetic that in the same month Napster launched a quarter century ago, the most feared, bewildering, buzzed about companies in the current music industry landscape find themselves directly in the well-resourced crosshairs of the RIAA and the majors. Time is a flat circus.
$150 million - alleged reduction in royalties paid by Spotify to songwriters
Speaking of lawsuits, I missed the Mechanical Licensing Collective suing Spotify in May. The blunt point: Whether you are an generative AI music start up, or the most powerful streaming service in the world, you are probably not properly remunerating copyright holders and creators.
You also probably do not give a flying fuck as long as investors and shareholders remain happy.
To mark the middle of the year, enjoy the first Applied Science playlist of 2024.
Thanks for explaining the geographical distribution wrinkle! Hadn’t previously considered that