#22 What it feels like to be wrapped in numbers

Some thoughts on Spotify Wrapped and why it makes me, and many of my friends, feel like shit.

Just want to start by thanking everyone for their kind and thoughtful responses to my last newsletter!

If you missed it, I was “on one” as they say. It was enormously helpful for me personally to write that list. It just all streamed out of me that morning, and I was nervous about sending it out.

Hearing back from you that I’d struck a chord or even just got you thinking a bit, I can’t tell you how much that means, so thank you. I’ll be returning to that line of thought very soon - but it has been good to put it to one side and let it percolate for a couple weeks.

Today, some thoughts on Spotify Wrapped and why it makes many artists feel like shit. But first, a meeting with a music marketer.

MUSIC AS DATA

A few days ago, I started my morning by meeting with someone who had offered to give me some advice on “getting the most out of my releases” on digital platforms.

He ran me through a presentation which contained a lot of good, practical advice: keep your artist profiles updated on Spotify, Apple Music, etc. Make sure your distributor has all the assets and info they need weeks if not months in advance.

One interesting bit of advice was that I should be doing more to actively engage in unique platform features like Spotify’s Marquee, Canvas and Discovery Mode, or Apple Music’s Spatial Audio feature. Specifically, we kicked around ideas on how I could use Spotify’s Music+Talk feature via Anchor to make podcast-style content around my music, which would make sense given my day job and the unique skill set I’ve developed in order to do that. Not a bad idea, maybe?

But more importantly, doing something like that would signal to the platform that I’m playing ball. The subtext here is that by playing into their unique feature offerings, it would make the platforms happy to know that I’m bending myself to operate as an artist under their terms, and maybe that might lead to them showing favour. Maybe.

Don’t get me wrong please - it was a great and very useful presentation and this dude is a very nice dude

And then there was, of course, the ongoing advice that I should always be spending some % of my expected revenue on paid marketing in the form of targeted ads on Meta, TikTok, YouTube, pay to get in front of eyeballs and earholes. (Which I just never do, because I’m a tight-ass, and lazy, and conflicted.)

What interested me most here was that this seemed to be not just about the actual act of getting in front of people’s eyeballs and earholes - though that is obviously the intended outcome of running targeted ads on these platforms. From what I understood, it was just as much about demonstrating to the streaming services themselves that you are invested, literally. If you can demonstrate that you are investing your own money into funnelling people to their platform, the platform is happy. Why wouldn’t they be? You’re doing their job, and you’re paying for it.

I’m encouraged to tell my distributor the details of my marketing spend, how much I’m spending and where it is going, what countries and demographics I’m targeting, so that they can take that information to DSPs when they pitch for editorial and playlist coverage. “Hey Apple Music, Tim Shiel is dropping $600 on Meta ads in Germany, with a link that sends people directly to stream the new song on your platform, so we’d love your German rep to take a serious look at it this time.” That kind of thing.

The bit I’m struggling to get past is … at quite a large scale, the DSPs have managed to outsource a big chunk of their own marketing spend to independent artists and labels like us. How dysfunctional is the streaming ecosystem when it has become built into the logic of how we work, that somehow I’m expected to be the one that drops money to tell people that Spotify, or Apple Music, or YouTube, or wherever, is the place you should go to listen to music? Do companies like this not have their own vast marketing budgets? Of course they do. Is it just greedy that on top of that, they expect artists to compete for how much additional marketing spend they can bring to the table to push people to their platform?

I read a book recently that helped me understand how we got here:

Written by Australian culture & tech academic Rebecca Giblin and long-time technology commentator Cory Doctorow, Chokepoint Capitalism runs through various case studies across music, television, film, book publishing, to explain why in their words “creative labor markets are borked”.

There are a lot of great insights in the book, but one simple key insight - a fact that is blindingly obvious but also kind of hidden in plain sight - is that due to a severe lack of regulation, the major platforms have been able to engineer a situation where they are so dominant, so in control of the market, that they can outrageously extract from both sides - the audience and the creator.

And they can simply keep upping the ante, until legislation or regulation brings them in line, or until creators feel empowered, educated and connected enough to take drastic collective action.

Getting out of this mess feels almost impossible. Paralysed by the feeling that we have “no other choice” than to have our products on these services, we become trapped in a state that Mat Dryhurst calls “streaming fatalism”:

There are no inevitable conclusions as to how we might organise ourselves through technology. I find this particularly important to remember when conversations often drift in to what I would describe as a streaming fatalism. The future of the music economy need not involve us debating the rent or sale of files that are a reductive proxy for the true value of music in our lives.

Nothing is inevitable, and it ought to be whatever we want it to be.

It ought to be yeah. Artists are so disempowered in an economic sense that in theory we have nothing to lose, and certainly nothing to gain by maintaining “business as usual.” But boy it’s hard. Narratives told to us by streaming services - about what it means to be an artist, and what the function and purpose of music is - align with and are reinforced by messages we get from other music industry infrastructure. Toxic ideas around success muddy up the narratives we tell each other, and ourselves, about what we do and why we do it.

The weight of it is hard to get out from under. This is definitely true for me - I struggle to sit with one foot in, and one foot out of, notions about what it means to be “doing well” as an artist, because some part of me can’t shake these toxic narratives. I’m surrounded by them everywhere. It is a grind, it’s daily work trying to process them.

But before you can process these unhelpful ways of thinking about music, or question them, you have to be able to see them. So let’s give it a go, shall we?

How does Spotify want us to think about our own music, as artists? There’s one day of the year where that feels most transparent.

HOW IT FEELS TO BE WRAPPED

Two days after my meeting with my music marketing friend, it’s Spotify Wrapped day.

This is a day that makes me, and many of my friends, feel like shit.

My friend Georgia put it well:

Today I opened my Spotify wrapped for artists. I was super surprised and delighted to discover 1.3k people streamed my songs for the first time in 2023. Wow!!!! Hello, new listeners!! My songs were added to 262 playlists. Two hundred and sixty TWO!! Can you believe it, 1.2k people had me in their “top 10 most listened to artists”, aaaaand I was 3 people’s number 1 artist this year. Incredible 🥰

Then I opened up IG and caught a look a some other artist’s wrapped. One singer-songwriter I’ve gigged with had playlist additions in the thousands. Okay. Another of my peers had streams in the millions. Okay. That same musician was a number 1 artist for over 10k people. Okay okay okay 😵‍💫

Suddenly I felt really, really shit. Embarrassed even, for being proud of my stats that pale in comparison.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

As an artist, Spotify Wrapped day can be brutal because it invites you to think about yourself as existing on a quantifiably measurable ladder of ‘success’, and reminds you firmly where you sit on that ladder. It’s the day where we all become numbers, where it is easiest to measure ourselves against each other. It’s the day where you wonder why your numbers are down on last year. It’s the day where you wonder what it was your friend did, exactly, to get to 100k or 1m or 10m.

It’s the day where no matter how many people listened, it’s not enough.

The slides below are from my own “Spotify Wrapped” as Tim Shiel (l‘artiste) - not the one you get as a listener (I got one of those too), but the one they served to me as an artist via the Spotify for Artists platform.

This truly is the day where Spotify’s vision of music feels most transparent to me, because I’m served an interactive experience that is only for me. This is their chance to really directly give me an understanding of what I mean to them, as a creator on their platform. I imagine it is something they give great thought to.

And on this one day, where they create a crafted, interactive experience for you, the artist, to reflect on what you’ve achieved for the year and how your music has landed in the big old wide world - all they’ve got to say to you really, is numbers. Because that’s all they’ve got. Spotify’s vision of music appears to be one where “people feeling what you do” is not really about feelings at all - its about numbers.*

In this world, the act of listening is not about connection, or discovery, or wonder, it’s not really about anything. It’s simply an accumulation of time and quantity, the tracking of “how many minutes” and “how many listeners.” A successful song is one that holds people’s attention inside the Spotify ecosystem, so that they can sell ads, sell subscriptions, and collate data to analyse and sell to third parties. Time, in the form of attention, is money. So they want to reward you not for the qualitative impact of your music on people, but for its quantitative measurable reach, giddily broken down into seconds, minutes, days.

Big numbers feel good. Right? They do. Mindy Meng Wang 王萌 & I had a song reach 1 million streams last month. That felt amazing. We celebrated.

Except… I started the year hoping for bigger numbers. I set myself goals, because that’s something you are meant to do. Right? I see other artists hitting targets and think, why not me? I’ll set a goal, reach it, and feel great. Right? But I didn’t reach them, not this year. Spotify Wrapped is here to remind me, I didn’t get there. It didn’t quite work. Maybe next year.

Ok, well, thanks. That’s a tricky feeling, but I think I can process it.

Then I get on my Instagram and see people with numbers 10x or 100x as big and think - no wait. I think I did screw it up this year. What exactly went wrong? What should I have done differently? Why them? Why not me? And then, instantly feeling like a complete idiot for feeling this way, feeling deep shame, deeply disappointed in myself for having these thoughts. I should know better, right? I tell myself, “today is a bad day to be on Instagram” and close the app. Wait for that sick feeling to leave my stomach.

“One track made all your other tracks jealous.”

Spotify Wrapped is a world where I’m encouraged to imagine my songs as competitors for attention, even amongst themselves. I’m encouraged to buy into a mindset where I should be proud of “Sparrow” not because it meant something to someone, but because it has the biggest number written next to it and therefore “made all my other tracks jealous”.

If that’s how my songs feel about each other - competitive, envious, petty - is that how us artists are meant to feel about each other too? If someone sees my numbers, even here in this newsletter, and my numbers are bigger than their numbers, should I feel great that they might have a moment of jealousy, and feel insecure and dejected? Do you feel that way, right now? Is that your fault? Is it mine? No, and no.

Why do they choose to present our listeners to us, on this day, as numbers and not as human beings? Spotify isn’t evil, it’s a business. By getting me to imagine my music and my audience as numbers, by getting me to care about the numbers, the platform has - though I hope not entirely - gotten me to internalise a tech company’s way of thinking about music.

The more I become invested in the numbers - see joy in the numbers going up, and frustration when the numbers go down - the more I are likely to spend my precious time working in service of that platform’s own goals.

Which are, essentially, summarised in just three words: numbers go up.

ZOOM OUT .. A BIT

A quick note to say - I don’t judge any artist for being genuinely proud of their numbers or for sharing their Spotify Wrapped on socials. As artists, we often feel lost, unsure of what “success” even is, how to define it for ourselves.

We feel overwhelmed, disconnected from each other. We want to demonstrate to our fans - and our friends - that we know how much joy it can bring them to see us excited and taking pride in ourselves. And we desperately want to actually feel that pride in our work and ourselves.

I got specific here on Spotify Wrapped but really my criticism is of the broader infrastructure and systems, that wield unprecedented power and influence over the mindshare of artists and music fans, and how these companies spread narratives that do deep, sustained damage. Like I said - to process this shit, you have to be able to see it. To see it, I often rely on other people pointing it out. If I can point one or two things out, when I see them and feel them, maybe it helps us all move along a bit.

None of what I’ve said here is intended as a judgement or criticism on the behaviour of artists - we work within the systems we are provided, and we are doing the goddamn best we can to look after ourselves.

With that in mind, I want to zoom out for some context, before I go.

A good book to refer to when zooming out re: the experience of being an artist right now is Can Music Make You Sick?, written by academics and reformed music-industry workers George Musgrave and Sally Gross a couple years ago. It was the culmination of a four-year study that aimed to better understand why rates of anxiety and depression are higher amongst people who identify as musicians, than in the broader population. I am always banging on about this book and I’ve gotten to know George & Sally a little since the book came out - they gave their blessing for me to share this free PDF link, so go nuts.

Be warned, the book is a heavy read. But if you can bear it, it contains incredibly insightful - often heart-breaking - excerpts from conversations had with hundreds of artists around London and the UK, working at all levels of music.

Reflecting on those ground-level insights, it draws some compelling conclusions:

As a reflexive workforce, musicians are able to articulate how the turbulence of the competing interests plays out in their lives and impacts their sense of wellbeing. They recognise the illusions, the smoke and mirrors; they clearly enjoy and are driven by the moments of intensity and pleasure musical practices give them, but they struggle internally and externally with the pressure they perceive as coming from their work environment – the music industries – and the impact this has on their relationships with those closest to them.

The musicians we spoke to shared a very real sense of personal responsibility and talked about degrees of coping. They were clearly aware that even their friendships were impacted by competitiveness. Some acknowledged the discomforting sense of hoping for support from other musicians – from other friends – and the disappointment when that does not materialise; the piggybacking or collaboration that has become such an important part of musical career development and validation. The musicians then doubt whether these friendships are real, feeding the doubt and the reflexive loop which keeps the treadmill spinning. However, at the same time, there is real, deep and meaningful joy in the sociality of music, particularly emphasised by interviewees when they spoke of playing live together or writing a great song, and how this was a way of recharging their love for music – of keeping them alive.

We have all experienced this: that moment we are out dancing and listening to music together and the power it has to move us, physically and emotionally, to raise our spirits. Musicians then have their energies rebuilt by experiencing music making, only to have it drained again in the daily struggle to maintain their careers and their position within the music industry.

This is what they mean when they say they love music, but it is the music industry that is hurting them.

Till next time

Tim

ps. I promise I’ll have some new music share on the next one

*As an aside - the case could be made that actually Spotify could tell you more about how your listeners feel - nuanced, sophisticated things about your audience and their behaviours, moods and how they connect to your music. As Liz Pelly explained four years ago (!) in her Baffler column “Big Mood Machine”, Spotify is no different to other tech platforms in that they are constantly iterating on sophisticated techniques for extracting user’s behaviours, moods, feelings, building models of their users based on the data they collect themselves and collate from third parties. All that vast computational power, and human knowledge, that behind the scenes is being applied to study consumer behaviour - but they only show us the raw numbers, not the additional insights they are extracting from the data which is way more valuable and probably quite useful to artists and their teams.