Numbers on the Board (August 2024)
Wherein I somehow get through an edition of this column without mentioning AI or a catalog sale...
“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.
37.7% - A growing proportion of “independent” artists
Over the past few years of Applied Science, I’ve enumerated my issues with the term “independent” as it so often gets slapped on artists and companies in the current music industry context. At best, it is incomplete, ignoring the commercial circumstance in which almost every largely digital thing exists. At worst, it is a complete fiction, referring to music that runs through the pipes of a major music company’s distribution channels in one way or another, qualifying as “independent” because it is not owned by Universal, Sony, or Warner, but merely released and exploited by them “indirectly” for a time.
The mid year report from music industry metrics company Luminate paints a picture of a landscape in flux, with “independent” artists meaningfully gaining ground in their share of songs between 1-10m streams (increase from 61.5% to 62.1% of share), 10m-50m streams (increase from 35.1% to 37.4% share), 50m-100m streams (increase from 20.3% to 22.1% of share), 100m-500m streams (increase from 12.3% to 13.6% of share), and 500m+ streams (increase from 7.1% to 9.9% of share) in the first half of 2024 as compared with the second half of 2023 (see chart below).
In the 10m to 50m range, 37.7% of artists could be defined as “independent.”
62.1% of artists logging 1m-10m streams in the same period were “independent.” As you might expect, artists generating hundreds of millions and billions of streams shift significantly from the independent to major companies.
Only 3 out of 46 artists (or 6.5%) with over 1b streams in the first half of 2024 could be considered independent.
These numbers make logical sense. Artists with smaller stream counts are typically “developing” acts. Artists who may have recorded songs in their bedrooms or local recording studios, releasing through services like Tunecore and Distrokid that are readily available to any member of the public. Artists amassing billions of streams are typically superstars or, at very least, very deeply known. Superstars usually have major label deals because they were either buoyed in part by the major label system or did business that demanded the funding and infrastructure major labels typically provide. (It’s a bit of a goofy tautology: artists signed to majors do major numbers, justifying their signing to majors).
Consider these stats alongside the notion that two of the “independent” artists in the billion stream group, Shaboozey (distributed by Empire, also formerly signed to Universal-owned Republic Records) and Tommy Richman (signed to Pulse Records, distributed by Concord), have had significant success at terrestrial radio, the traditional domain of major labels and one of the waning relative merits of Sony, Universal, and Warner’s subsidiaries in relation to their “independent” counterparts. With one “independent” artist (Shaboozey) holding the #1 slot on Top 40 radio, another challenging him for it (Richman), and the continued streaming growth of their counterparts, the tide seems to crawl inexorably in the direction of the rapidly expanding “independent” artist class.
Exciting as these developments might seem, these sorts of statistics obfuscate the reality. Concord is one of the most well-capitalized companies in music, “independent” or otherwise, and is also distributed by Universal. That relationship means Pulse’s “independent” success with Tommy Richman actually benefits Universal’s market share. Hardly a win for the bedroom artists distributing music through Tunecore. Similarly, Empire has had partnerships with Atlantic and Universal over the years, and is as well-resourced as any major label (if not as deeply subsidized by historical catalog).
Ultimately, my gripe is largely a semantic one. The term independence has largely lost its meaning, applied to artists and entities that bear little resemblance to the mom and pop shops or DIY artists of yore. I don’t romanticize that term or that era, but I do think we need to develop more instructive language for describing the realities of the current landscape. You can call an artist autonomous, you can say that someone isn’t signed to a major label, but to refer to anyone or anything as independent feels misleading, incomplete, or aspirational.
3:05 & 3:04 - Rap Caviar & Today’s Top Hits Song length check in
Two months into my exercise in tracking average song length on Spotify’s Rap Caviar and Today’s Top Hits, and the results are…less than revealing. The average song length on Rap Caviar since 6/14/24 (the date we began logging data) is 3:05; it was 3:09 on the first tracking date. The average song length on Today’s Top Hits is 3:04; it was 3:04 on the first tracking date.
Perhaps the only interesting thing about each figure over the last 12 weeks is how little each number has fluctuated. For Rap Caviar, average length has shifted within a 13 second range, with the shortest average at 3:00 (week of 8/09) and longest at 3:13 (week of 7/26). The spread was even less dramatic for TTH, sporting a seven second range. Both these durations reflect cemented placement for most songs over the course of the last several months.
This information isn’t necessarily interesting in a vacuum, but maybe there is another set of statistics that shed light on the nature of attention in our current moment…
40% - The percentage of Billboard Top 10’s that fall out of position after a week
Perhaps in line with the declining length of big hit songs, it seems that conventional hits are fading from the top of the Billboard charts sooner than in past eras. Per Billboard’s Elias Leight, 75% of 2024’s top 10 hits debuted on the chart within the top 10, but 40% of them only spent a week in the top 10 before tumbling.
“Since 2000, the average single that debuts in the top 10 hangs there for roughly six weeks. In contrast, tracks that take two to eight weeks to ascend to that position linger for more than 11 weeks.
This dynamic has become more extreme in the heart of the streaming era. Since 2015, singles that start out in the top 10 last 6.3 weeks on average, while tracks that take two to four weeks to reach the top 10 last more than twice as long — 12.7 weeks. And songs that take five to eight weeks to ascend to the top 10 do even better, lasting for an average of 13-plus weeks.”
Are our attention spans shorter? Are new hit-making artists burning out faster because they haven’t built the traditional fanbases that their more senior counterparts have? Are hit songs just not as catchy as they used to be?
Leight suggests one practical reason for these rapid drops: Many superstar artists often see multiple songs from blockbuster albums chart in the top 10 upon release, only to have the singles stick around after the first week while album tracks fall as consumption driven by initial fervor fades. This phenomenon is a modern distortion. In a past where albums were sold as units and singles were considered separate from the body of work, album cuts that weren’t promoted as singles rarely charted. In an era when bodies of work comprise individual songs which generate their own consumption metrics, possess viral potential, and can all potentially become a “single,” the very nature of how songs are considered for chart purposes has irrevocably changed.
When artists, producers, and songwriters hitch their fortune to the Hollywood dream machine and risk life and limb for success in the music business, they often either lust after placements in films, television shows, and ads, or learn how to gear their entire businesses around the industry sub category of sync (short for synchronization) licensing. With good reason. Licensing can be lucrative, not only for the fees associated with uses in individual shows, movies, or ads, but also for the concurrent boost a popular sync can have on streams and sales.
As with anything in the overstuffed attention economy, an individual sync may not mean as much as it did years back when, say, a film like Wayne’s World could return “Bohemian Rhapsody” to the top of the charts or, more recently, a show like Insecure could come to define the sound of R&B for a time, helping a bevy of artists legitimize themselves in the process. Even in scattered times, a well-placed sync in a culturally significant film can drive major consumption.
And so I guess we have Deadpool and Wolverine to thank for returning NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” (which leaped a whopping 879% in streams, clocking 35.8m in a tracking week that saw it chart on Billboard for the first time in years) and the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris,” two songs that were already really fucking big hits, to the Billboard charts some two decades after their initial release. Big win for the little guys in the age of independence!