When I set out to create this project, I started with a single case study focused on a local band to see what kind of data I could obtain about them from Chartmetric, and how this data would look when plotted out over time. Fortunately, Chartmetric’s database allowed me to access this artists’ monthly listeners, followers, as well as both editorial and user-curated playlisting data. This first study I conducted was on Fanclubwallet, using not only data pulled from their Chartmetric profile, but also using unique streaming data that she gave me access to. Given Fanclubwallet’s unique circumstances that led her to success and even a record deal during the pandemic, her study prompted me to question how other Canadian artists were performing on Spotify at various stages in career. But this time the selection of these artists was not based on metrics we’ve seen previously, like conversion rates or followers, instead they have been chosen based on if they are unsigned, signed to an independent label, or signed to a major label.
The purpose of this exercise is to address some of the discourse around the long-held belief that being signed to a label is crucial to be successful as a musician. With the advent of independent music distribution services like Distrokid, and streaming services that use editorial playlisting to promote independent artists like Spotify’s RADAR US - Artists to Watch, the need for a label signing is being questioned. Artists have more control over their music now than they ever have, but is it enough to submit to Spotify playlists and hope for exposure overnight? Let’s see if looking at playlisting trends, as well as listenership and followers can help shine a light on what the realities of exposure and engagement are like for many Canadians on Spotify today.
I was incredibly lucky to know a musician who could give me insight into her unique experience as a “successful pandemic artist” and allow me to build a model through her lens. For context, Hannah Judge (of Fanclubwallet) is a 22-year-old chronically ill, white woman from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, with experience in the arts from an early age. Judge attended the local arts high school for visual arts, engaging with the music community in Ottawa from an aesthetics perspective (aiding bands with show photography, posters, and music videos) since her mid-teens. She then went to Concordia University for a Bachelor of Fine Arts for a year before deciding to leave her studies and focus on music. Along the way Judge has released casual demos of songs on Soundcloud, and later moved on to form a band with two other local musicians, gaining crucial insight to the production of songs and the creative writing/recording process. I detail these parts of Judge’s experience as she deems them relevant to where she’s ended up today.
I also think it’s important to note before we examine Fanclubwallet’s data, her situation is unique to many artists in that she started her career as a serious musician just as the Covid-19 pandemic started. The way that she released music, the time people were spending adjusting to isolation, and various other factors surely impacted her success, however as this is the first global pandemic in the digital age, it is difficult to measure how exactly this unique situation has affected her. So with this in mind, let’s take a look at the line chart below.
The x-axis is time measured in days and the y-axis labeled “Spotify Units” refers to a single unit of either a listener, follower, or stream on Spotify. From Chartmetric, we can see the number of unique users that listened to her music on any given day (dating as far back as Chartmetric can track) in blue. In green, we see the number of followers she’s amassed. And because of the information I was able to retrieve directly from her Spotify for Artists account, we can see the number of streams she has obtained per day in red.
With a bit of research, we can better understand what certain spikes mean, like the major increase in Spotify streams on May 14th, 2021, which coincides with the release of her first EP Hurt is Boring. You can also see a slight increase in followers just before the release of Hurt is Boring with her release of “C’mon Be Cool” off the EP. And even though Fanclubwallet started gaining traction on her own, a month before the release of the EP she signed a contract with AWAL (Artists Without a Label), a British music distribution company owned by Sony. This contract allotted funding specifically for an upcoming album as well as provided new opportunities for gaining traction with her future releases.
Hover over the chart below to see the number of streams (red), number of listeners (blue), or number of followers (green) Fanclubwallet had on any given day.
Charts like Fanclubwallet’s serve as a great tool for pointing us in the direction of further investigation with questions like: “why is there a spike in followers here?” or “what happened to her release post-label signing?”. This first chart lets us see relationships between the three metrics of followers, listeners, and streams not as independent variables but as parts that make up the whole story of fan engagement/loyalty. This brings us to the next question I was drawn to address when looking at Fanclubwallet’s data; what role does Spotify’s playlisting capability play in her success?
If you recall from the previous studies we covered on this site, we discussed the importance of an active fanbase, and how we gauged this through exposure and Chartmetric’s Spotify conversion rate (which was a division of followers by monthly listeners). So applying this idea of an active fanbase, an active listener is a user who is likely to engage with an artist somehow, be it through following the artist (contributing to that artist’s conversion rate), adding tracks to their library, or through adding these tracks to their own playlists. Whereas a passive listener is a listener who doesn’t take it upon themselves to save tracks, follow, or add the artist to their playlists. Passive listeners often discover artists through algorithmic recommendations or editorial playlists on Spotify but don't feel the need to interact beyond listening once.
For the examination of active versus passive listenership of Canadian music careers, there are two assumptions made about the roles Spotify editorial playlists have, and the roles fan/listener-curated playlists have. Editorials (curated playlists by Spotify employees with a wide audience of followers) act as a launchpad for artists on Spotify to get discovered. This discovery is often seen as a practical necessity for many modern musicians on Spotify to gain the traction needed to be recognized as worthy of a contract by major labels. It should be noted here that in this assumption, label contracts are still viewed as a main criterion for success for many musicians, and as a result make the reach editorial playlist have, far more lucrative. The downside to this approach however is although wide reach is assumed, it is only a “breakthrough” method of gaining traction because editorial playlists create passive listenership. Beyond editorial playlists there are fan-curated playlists, which generate active listenership and are assumed to be the keystone to an online artist’s career because they are a solid indication of the amount of future traction an artist will receive on releases. Fan-curated playlists may not have the allure that editorials have since they are generally less likely to be seen by label agents, but they indicate future success and a strong engagement rate.
As a tool for artists looking to expand their careers, playlisting engages users and offers a larger audience for future releases, but it also determines a standard for new talent as set by editorial staff and labels. This can be beneficial to those that have a sound appealing to editors, but can also leave behind artists with unique sounds that would only appeal to a more niche audience. When we observe the success of Fanclubwallet, we can see how playlisting has affected her releases positively by ultimately pushing them into more hands, capturing a new audience and the eyes of what is now her current label, AWAL. For example, on May 13, 2021, Judge accumulated about 1160 user-created playlists (indicated in blue) that included her songs, reaching a high of 9,800,000 potential listeners (indicated in red).
This spike makes sense since she had just released her debut EP. The fact that these 1160 playlists were user-curated indicates that she had a strong active listenership, with followers who were willing to put her tracks off the new release onto their personal playlists. Moreover, on this same day, she reached a high of approximately 9,500,00 potential plays by editorial playlists. Interestingly, despite the notion that editorial playlists get artists the exposure they seek, the exposure via users’ playlists was greater!
But let’s look further back at her first hit song “Car Crash in G Major”, which was released pre-AWAL signing on September 24, 2020. As of April 2022, “Car Crash in G Major” has over 6,000,000 streams, and when it was released we can see an immediate uptick in reach through the 77 user-created playlists the track was added to, which reached about 2.10 million ears! Once again, the reach from editorials was less than those of user playlists.
Something to remember here if you’re wondering why editorials aren't surpassing the exposure of regular playlists is that some Spotify users have highly acclaimed profiles though their heavily followed playlists, as users trust their recommendations. Examples of this phenomenon come from Birp! or David Dean Burkhart’s weekly rotation indie playlist titled Compact Cassette. It seems that even when editorials can push artists into more hands, the power of exposure to make or break a band can still be held by the listeners themselves- a trend any music geek should find inspiring and empowering!
Hover over the chart below to see the total number of playlists Fanclubwallet's songs had been added to by Spotify users (blue), the number of listeners these tracks reached from user-made playlists (red), or the number of listeners reached by editorial playlists made by Spotify employees (green).
Keep in mind that while the blue line appears flat from afar, if you zoom in on it to scale down the y-axis, you can see the variation in playlists more clearly!
The following table breaks down a list of the artists that were chosen to be the first expansion of my corpus, and the following section shows three of these artists I’ve included in the final study. The table shows the artist’s name, followed by the major label, indie label, or confirmation of no label. The band’s hometown and genre are indicated to give background of geographic representation around Canada, as well as what genres are loosely represented in the following data. The main sectioning of these artists and bands is by the state of their career judged by label signings; being signed to a major label, an indie label, or no label signing. Per Kore Studios, a major label is defined by their high percentage of record sales annually, along with “their ability to publish, distribute, and market their own content”. The four major labels are Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, EMI and Warner Music Group. However, an independent label is a label that does not have the reach or resources that a major label has and is not backed by a major label financially. The latter distinction is key in understanding the difference between a label such as AWAL, who pitch themselves as an indie-adjacent label but is still owned by Sony, and Arts & Crafts, a significant and popular Canadian label who still isn’t owned by any major backer and is thus an “indie” label.
Peach Pit, my first case study, is an indie pop/rock band from Vancouver, British Columbia. I chose to include them over Arcade Fire for this final study because I planned to include another Montreal band and wanted to grab a wider variety geographically among my selection of artists. They’re currently signed to RCA Records (which is owned by Sony Music Entertainment) and have released three albums, Being So Normal (2017), You and Your Friends (2020), and From 2 to 3 (2022). They’ve been steadily gaining exposure via hit tracks used on video apps like TikTok and Instagram. In fact, if you look at the first chart below with the comparison of listeners vs followers, you can see this massive growth of listeners since July of 2018 (in red). As of November 7, 2021, Peach pit has an 8:1 ratio of listeners to followers. This large ratio is shown clearly by the large gap between the red and blue lines below, however Peach Pit is a good example of how a lower conversion rate of 0.125 (compared to say, Arcade Fire, who had a conversion rate of 0.83) doesn't necessarily equate to a less successful career. While they may have more passive listeners than other larger bands signed to major labels, their most recent 2022 tour had over 40 dates (many of which were sold out).
Below shows the playlisting trends of Peach Pit from February 2017 to April 2022. You can see a steady increase in the number of playlists from users that reached wide audiences (red) as well as from editorial staff at Spotify (green) since 2018, picking up heavily during April 2020 when their studio album “You and Your Friends” was released as the first album under their Columbia deal. This deal was announced as confirmed on July 31 of 2018, just as the spike shown in their charts below. Further down the timeline, we see a major spike in January 2022 with respect to playlist reach from both users and editorials. This spike coincides with the announcement of a new upbeat single “Vickie” off their highly anticipated third album.
The artist I chose to represent the independently signed artists in Canada is Backxwash because of her unique background and genre representation. Backxwash, a metal/horrorcore rapper located in Montreal. She is signed to Montreal’s Grimalkin Records, which she contributes to in an unconventional way (participating in all levels of the management process), describing the label as “non-hierarchical, democratic” and not motivated by capitalism. She released her first album, Deviancy, with Grimalkin and has since kept with the team. The rest of her discography consists of three EPs (F.R.E.A.K.S, Black Sailor Moon, and Stigmata), as well as her 2020 Polaris Music Prize winning album, God Has Nothing to Do with This Leave Him Out of It. In 2021, she released another album I Lay Here Buried with My Rings and My Dresses.
Below, you can see that Backxwash’s hit album God Has Nothing to Do with This Leave Him Out of It was released in May 2020 and gained a spike in listeners and playlisting. The listeners and followers rest at a 1.8:1 ratio, meaning her engagement is tied to her fans quite significantly. We should note that there is a significant amount of data missing from the pulled Chartmetric CSV for Backxwash’s listener and follower counts, which is why there is nothing displayed before March 18, 2020 is displayed on the chart.
In Backxwash’s playlisting chart you can see that fan-made playlists with her tracks reach double the audience that the editorials reach (indicated in red and green), further adding to her reach being attributed to strong engagement with listeners. We can once again see that playlisting by users and distributed among users is just as, if not more powerful than the reach of editorial playlists. In fact, after her 2020 release where her total playlisting count was spiked, she saw even wider reach with editorials and user-created playlists for her next album release in June of 2021, which could be attributed to her high conversion rate from passive listeners to active listeners that would stick around to engage in her career during future releases.
The final section of my expansion for this phase of the research follows Triples, a 90s-inspired alternative rock sister-duo based in Toronto. While they have a smaller following compared to the other artists we’ve examined (sitting at 147 followers on Spotify as of April 2022), they have had excellent opportunities to represent themselves to larger audiences aside from Spotify, with offers to open for Tokyo Police Club, to featured articles in Exclaim! Magazine, NOW magazine, and the Toronto Star.
However despite these markers of interest from the industry, Triples’ follower count is much higher than their active listeners, even though their most recent album Big Time was released in January of 2020, their listenership decreases to net negative. This could be due to inactivity online or a lull in shows being played.
When observing their playlistings, I found they had no editorial playlists and had a maximum of 25 fan-curated playlists giving them a potential reach of only about 5000. These numbers are much more familiar for a small, unsigned artist. When hovering over the points on this line plot, you’ll notice that there's only one line on the plot instead of the previous three you’ve been seeing for past case studies. This is because the CSV form Chartmetric imported the data for Triples differently, forcing me to work around this by showing the single line for the number of playlists users had included in their tracks in. I then had to show the number of users these playlists reached in the hover box above each point. Triples’ playlisting data is an example of how valuable that jumping off point of getting picked up by a heavily followed editorial playlist can be. It’s no secret that smaller bands could benefit from being pushed into the rotations of hundreds of thousands more, and it’s understandable how with numbers that don't seem to be picking up on Spotify despite rave reviews from press releases or magazines, to push beyond the small crowd of followers, editorial playlists can seem essential.