I must confess one thing.
In recent years, Spotify launches a service called Wrapped at the end of the year that shows users which bands, songs and styles they have listened to the most. In addition, it tells you how many minutes they have listened to music on the service and what percentile they are in.
The year 2022 appeared in my Wrapped that I had listened to for 15 thousand minutes. I shared it on Facebook and Instagram like many people, including hundreds of my contacts on those social networks. And all of them had listened to more – and sometimes a lot – more music than me, sometimes on the order of 30 thousand or 45 thousand.
I got excited and for 2023 I did the following. I left my Spotify on on the computer as long as I could, sometimes without turning off my PC for several days, and at the end of the year my Wrapped told me that I had listened to 272,000 minutes (the equivalent of four full months non-stop throughout). of the year) and that placed me in the 99.9th percentile of global auditors. Plus, at some point during these four months I realized that I could put a song on loop and I selected Minor League New Year’s Eve. It was no small thing, I have listened to Las Ligas Menores 2,612 times, that is equivalent to my listening has meant that Spotify has paid Las Ligas Menores just for my listening $6.22 (given that Spotify pays the artists who have songs in their database $0.002 for each play). And there are people who have taken advantage of this idea. For example, in Bulgaria Spotify discovered that one or a few bands were getting a lot of money for views, but that there were only a few accounts that listened to that band (whose songs lasted about thirty seconds, the minimum that a song must last to be considered. page for each play). Plus, Spotify almost doesn’t list short most played songs. In fact, according to data from my Last FM to csv application, I can list each song I have listened to and how many times: last 2023, my most listened to song according to Last FM to csv was Royce Prichard – Somewhere over the rainbow, a lullaby version / music box of this original theme from the movie The Wizard of Oz. But at the end of the year Wrapped didn’t consider it for my list.
Does Taylor Swift finally have a Billie Jean? Not for the entire planet, but for the tens of millions of her followers; like All Too Well (10 Minute Version), which, at least for me, is a masterpiece. Maybe Taylor Swift will never have a song of the global relevance of Billie Jean, but given how consumption and popularity works today (atomized, although with millions of followers, a product of the Internet), she does have extraordinarily popular songs and, if I pressure to give a personal opinion of a man over fifty years old, they will last the same over time.
How much does Taylor Swift earn from her Spotify streams? In 2024 alone, $310 million: outrageous. Furthermore, it happens, for example, in YouTube streaming that you also pay per play and on Wikipedia there is a list of songs that have exceeded 1 billion views. The record is held today by “Baby Shark Dance” with more than 14 billion views. I reviewed the complete list on Wikipedia and came to one that I didn’t know at all, Passenger – “Let Her Go” with almost four billion views. I asked my almost five thousand contacts on Facebook in a post if they knew it and almost all the answers were negative. Does that mean that just like in Bulgaria Passenger or Taylor Swift are heard in loop just for a few, or many, accounts?
No not at all.
Taylor Swift is listened to today by more than 107 million people around the world, being the artist in second place in popularity on the planet in that system; only behind The Weeknd with 112 million people.
In the past, listeners were counted, until almost the end of the 19th century by librarians who kept a record of how many times the scores of the popular songs kept by the libraries were requested; then there were the albums sold; and since 1955 the record was kept in the United States by Billboard, recording the best-selling songs among other combined measures and giving rise to the rankings and Number 1 (Top 1) week by week.
How many Top 10 hits have the Pet Shop Boys had – according to these measures? Only in England, 22, since West end Girls in 1985. Not bad, to the point that in the eighties they declared that they were going to be more important for music than the Beatles themselves, just as John Lennon had declared in the sixties , “we are more popular than Jesus.”
Today the audiences are more atomized than in the time of the Beatles or the Pet Shop Boys themselves and the followers of Taylor Swift, who are a very active community, the “swifties”, like a few years ago the “directioners” were ( followers of One Direction) or the “beliebers” (followers of Justin Bieber), and also the followers of K-Pop [de hecho en 2016 yo hice una búsqueda de los Trending Topics en Twitter en Chile y descubrí que cada sábado se disparaban los tuiteos sobre el K-Pop, a raíz de que los fanáticos del estilo se agrupan en fandoms y votan en competencias de popularidad de estas bandas K-Pop cada semana].
Is this new? Not at all, in the sixties there were also the “Beatlemaniacs”. The difference is that now, as I said above, the audiences, even though they number tens of millions of people, have atomized and Taylor Swift has never been heard by perhaps billions of people on the planet, unlike the Beatles or the same Pet Shop Boys who, in an era of radio, TV, and Wurlitzers on the beaches, were known to “everyone.”
Does Taylor Swift finally have a Billie Jean? Not for the entire planet, but for the tens of millions of her followers; like All Too Well (10 Minute Version), which, at least for me, is a masterpiece. Maybe Taylor Swift will never have a song of the global relevance of Billie Jean, but given how consumption and popularity works today (atomized, although with millions of followers, a product of the Internet), she does have extraordinarily popular songs and, if I pressure to give a personal opinion of a man over fifty years old, they will last the same over time.
