songs that weren't a bands biggest hit, but have gone on to be their legacy song and biggest iTunes seller

How do Spotify playlists even get made, is it just one person, do they have meetings, rough drafts?

remember that scene in _the show_ where russell simmons is on the treadmill listing off which songs are to be on the def jam 10th anniversary box set?

it's kinda like that, except daniel ek isn't on a treadmill. he's in an underground war room somewhere carrying out his process to world domination.

just noticed a satisfying example... in the 90s, i'm pretty sure i wanna be sedated and sheena is a punk rocker were played on alt radio more than blitzkrieg bop. i remember a key moment in my so called life when the edgy girl's band covers sedated. at college i certainly heard the ramones a lot more than most first wave punk bands, songs ranging from teenage lobotomy and pinhead to kkk took my baby away, bonzo goes to bitburg and pet sematary, a band sort of always in the background with a stronger legacy than the dolls, pistols, damned, even iggy.

the ramones' highest selling single was the 1980 reissue of sedated, which didn't chart but was apparently a steady seller. the highest charting song (top ten in the UK) by the band was their terrible cover of baby i love you, supposedly demo'd at gunpoint by phil spector and recorded with session musicians... so it's pleasant to see that blitzkrieg bop is now firmly well ahead of sedated in the streaming list, and baby i love you is down to #5. perhaps the turning point was 1994 when bop was included on jock rock volume 1.

The Fabulous Thunderbirds' cover of Slim Harpo's "Baby Scratch My Back" (from their first album in 1979) is their top Spotify track, with almost 4 million more spins than their sole US Top 40 hit "Tuff Enuff."

I may be missing something, but on the phone app rn, Stereolab's biggest track on Spotify is "Gabriel" from the BBC Sessions, which has almost 7 million more streams than "French Disko"

a recent streaming metadata snafu of some sort. The track 'gabriel' is not by stereolab, it's by lamb, and if you search for these keywords on Google and YouTube you see some other odd things, like a supposed digital only version of 'abc music' from 2003 that included songs by lamb, and YouTube uploads of lamb songs with the album art from the stereolab comp.

Last year when i streamed abc music, there were no lamb songs erroneously included...

Dance Yrself Clean by LCD Soundsystem; 118M plays, All My Friends; 73M.

a rare example of this from hip hop: Common's top spotify track (not counting some collaborations) is "Invocation," a non-single that had a video, from one of his lower selling early albums from the 90s. not sure if it was playlists or something that caused that, but a great track.

common's "invocation" is his top track on spotify. it was a single b-side for like the third single from the album it originally appeared on. it's a sick jimmy ponder smooth jazz guitar loop + the one where he says 'on a quest for love like the proceed drummer' but otherwise - HUH!? how did that get to be so popular??

(i mean i used to put that beat on at least 90% of my mixtapes back in the day, so maybe that affinty has carried over? it's not a song i'd quite call a deep cut, but again: it wasn't even a single and it's beating out stuff like "the light" and "go")

― interstellar anthropologist+music philosopher, (Austin), Wednesday, May 22, 2024 1:22 PM

omg when did some dude start posting here again

Wednesday, July 3, 2024 10:13 AM (three hours ago)

my bad, i was on my phone and wasn't able to easily search the thread

have been hanging around a little more in just the last couple weeks

hi. good to see you around. i'm just being silly, just my way of saying "yeah i noticed that too!"

sure sure. i just usually try to check before posting something that's already been posted so i was like d'oh.

Paul Simon is an interesting case. "You Can Call Me Al" wasn't his biggest solo chart hit by a long shot — peaked at #23 — but it his his most-Spotified by a factor of nearly 2:1 over "Me and Julio" and nearly 3:1 over "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover."

But Graceland was his biggest-selling album, and "You Can Call Me Al" still shows up on the radio pretty regularly. It's a killer groove, is the real thing.

That video was on MTV constantly though. I think if you’re in a certain age demo YCCMA is the most well known Simon solo song.

it’s very much in the wedding rotation too

Yeah for sure, it was his one real crossover with the MTV generation. Which gives it more reach/longer tail than his '70s stuff.

I was surprised to see Noisettes' big hitter on Spotify isn't the actual hit, Don't Upset the Rhythm (14m), but its flop follow up Never Forget You (144m). I'm assured it's a tiktok thing.

Still waiting for "Sister Rosetta (Capture The Spirit)" to emerge as the Noisettes's biggest song, because it's so fucking awesome

i would say personally, for whatever generation I represent YCCMA is the main Paul Simon song

Billboard has "Under Pressure" peaking at #29 yet it is more than a billion streams ahead of Bowie's #2

(that is to say, a billion ahead of Bowie's second most popular track on Spotify. sorry)

Huh, crazy that "Under Pressure" peaked at #29, I would have assumed it was a massive hit at the time. I guess it was more of a slow burner, though the appeal of the song seems immediate to me.

FWIW, I think of it as a Queen song (“with” Bowie). I know they’re credited equally… it was on Hot Space, tho

In the UK it was only their second #1 single after Bohemian Rhapsody. Many of the releases in-between peaked at #2

i was watching Queen Rock Montreal recently and "Under Pressure" gets a big crowd reaction despite being recent and Bowie not being there (sounded great live even w/o him though) -- turns out it was a #1 in Canada too, which makes its low peak in America feel like even more of an outlier.

Paul Simon is an interesting case. "You Can Call Me Al" wasn't his biggest solo chart hit by a long shot — peaked at #23 — but it his his most-Spotified by a factor of nearly 2:1 over "Me and Julio" and nearly 3:1 over "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover."

tbh I don't know the other 2 songs at all so that seems reasonable

I think with regards to Paul Simon, YCCMA is also really representative of a certain mid-80s kind of sound that was also found in some Huey Lewis songs, Walk of Life, Centerfield, Roll With It, etc. heavy on the horns or an organ, and a dancing in the aisles handclaps track for suburban parents. I mean a lot of those songs are actually great, it's not an insult, but considering the era its huge popularity makes complete sense.

tbh I don't know the other 2 songs at all so that seems reasonable

― Colonel Poo, Friday, July 5, 2024 1

You've never heard "Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard"? I've always found it ubiquitous, especially so after Wes Anderson got his mitts on it.

It (YCCMA) is one of those songs that was just really popular in unchartable ways. Like, I'm in my early 40s and I've heard that song in grocery stores since when it was practically new.

I'm sure someone here can help me figure this out. I tried googling it but nothing came up.
Cocteau Twins's second most streamed song on Spotify is the gorgeous "Sea, Swallow Me" from their pretty obscure album they did with Harold Budd, The Moon and the Melodies. Is it a commercial? A Tik Tok thing?

TikTok

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUnEhnWMZh8

Graceland is a double generation/double nostalgia album— heavy rotation with boomers while making an impression on their millennial kids

Wow, thanks jaymc !
I don't have Tik Tok and I have no idea what's happening in the video or why everyone's using the same song. But good for the CT for going viral !

I wanna say it was also an album that brought boomers and their parents together

YCCMA is also really representative of a certain mid-80s kind of sound that was also found in some Huey Lewis songs, Walk of Life, Centerfield, Roll With It, etc

This is a good point and I know the aesthetic you mean. Thinking also "Sledgehammer," "Glory Days," "Addicted to Love" — interesting that these are all by (at that point) 30-to-40-something-year-old artists freshening themselves up for the '80s. There should be a name for it.

but there is a name for it: post-boomercore.

yes i invented that name. if some asshole on rym can make up new genres with nonsense names like 'ZOLO' then i can definitely classify walk of life as peak mid-life crisis post-boomercore, god dammit. also the hide tag is f'kn money, ya'll. EVERY POST NEEDS ONE.

I genuinely have no memory of Under Pressure, despite it being a number one hit in Britain apparently. I was 8 at the time, I knew David Bowie from Ashes To Ashes and I'd seen Queen loads of times on Top of the Pops (We Are The Champions, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, etc) and I remember loads of other music from 1981, but somehow I seem to have missed this one completely. When Ice Ice Baby went to number one in 1990 and people were saying it was a rip off of Under Pressure I had no idea what they were talking about.

I see that totally wired is finally past lost in music on spotify, i always thought it was strange that a fairly random 90s single was their most streamed track.

Under Pressure was number 1 but they didn't promote it together or appear in the video, so wonder if it could have been far bigger at the time

re:"under pressure"
definitely an alltime jam. i recognized the source when i first heard vanilla ice, but didn't know the details of "under pressure." i liked vanilla ice when i heard it because of the beat. years later, i found out the details of "under pressure" and deferred to it as the better iteration of that beat. the lower chart position in the us does however explain why i could never find any used copies of the 12" when i started dj'ing.

far and away my favorite thing queen did.

xps to nasty:
same here, that is exactly my relationship with "under pressure".

austin reviews the post-boomercore canon.

I see that totally wired is finally past lost in music on spotify, i always thought it was strange that a fairly random 90s single was their most streamed track.

Not really "fairly random"... LIM has always been a fan-favorite, is often regarded as the Fall's best cover, and there's the novelty of them covering a disco track.

Graceland is a double generation/double nostalgia album— heavy rotation with boomers while making an impression on their millennial kids

Their Gen X kids, too. My dad (born 1946) played it in the car all the time; even went to see Simon live, despite not being much of a live-music guy generally. I can still replay about half of the album in my head.

When I was in Elementary School Music class in the early '90s, the "World Music" unit consisted of our teacher popping in the Graceland concert VHS and pressing 'Play'

Graceland was also both one of the last vinyl blockbusters and the first CD ones.

Peak cassette era too