Songs that became famous because of a system glitch

I ended up on a bunch of early-2000s Boards of Canada bootlegs due to mistagging which may or may not have been deliberate

I'd completely forgotten about Zeitgeist!

i remember that. Tar Heart was and remains a fantastic song!!

In a fitting end to the 2010s, Jeff Bezos is responsible for the last Number 1 Single of the year, Ellie Goulding's "River" (by Joni Mitchell).

Here's how:

1. You can't find it on Spotify, Apple, Google.
2. That's because - aside from Youtube - it's Amazon exclusive.

and...

— dan barker (@danbarker) December 28, 2019

good eye. the other amazon exclusive for this year, john legend's "happy xmas", is also now a top 10 uk hit single by the same conspiracy of mechanisms. feel weird linking my own words elsewhere, but it does add to what i wrote in another thread here about christmas tunes' (re)appearances on billboard in recent years: 1 2 3

it might be argued that all of these christmas songs' returns to the charts are, if not an actual system glitch (they're legitimately well-known and broadly-heard tunes), driven by feedback loops that weren't quite closed until streaming services, rather than dusty cd comps, became the dominant way by which the public chose to get into the spirit musically each year. the amount of money the biz stands to extract from the phenom goes up annually, so with each coming year the push from their end strengthens accordingly. now here we are with mariah carey on top of the american charts a full decade after it seemed like she would never have a big hit of any sort ever again. and labels will likely fight amongst themselves to have their artists' recordings placed among the coveted amazon exclusive slots.

I didn’t realize that Amazon Music was popular enough to be such a force.

most of the time, it's not! overall streaming activity occurs overwhelmingly thru spotify, apple music, and youtube -- except during the holiday season, when amazon music suddenly becomes a massive player in the game. apparently a ton of people who don't ordinarily stream much at all -- or at least don't bother streaming via amazon -- feel more than comfortable asking their smart speakers to queue up holiday music.

i'd also be willing to bet that "baby shark" saw an unusually large proportion of streams from amazon music

That’s pretty interesting!

can’t discount the number of people getting new gadgets, amazon or otherwise, that have alexa as a present

I’d hazard a guess that “play Christmas music” is one of the first things people try out

Maybe, but that wouldn’t account for pre-Xmas charts...

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-a-long-lost-indian-disco-record-won-over-crate-diggers-and-cracked-the-youtube-algorithm/?fbclid=IwAR1pOjm2QL6206Qj78ftMgJsrqU-Km8O4_IEhfDz5ro-TLjs8BL_BpmWuVY

The end of this article is particularly satisfying.

I thought this would be about that Disco Raga album but this is actually even cooler

hard to believe it's only 2015-16 that it was put on youtube and found by Dan Snaith on there.

a song called Maybe by Kettenkarussell is almost always up next on youtube regardless of what I'm currently watching or listening to on there. The track is... okay, I guess? It has 10million + views now. I'm sure that's a few million up from the last time I clocked the play count. I wonder why?

Facebook is today actively fighting punishment in court for election fraud in the state I live in, and wilfully spreading misinformation about bushfires that will lead to more human deaths, more hundreds of thousands of wildlife deaths, and potentially the eradication of agriculture in the state I come from. Please don't monetise ILX to their benefit.

Ok fine

lol

Some pretty blissed-out YT comments for that “Maybe” track.

All those records sound the same to me, lol ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you leave Soundcloud running after the track ends, the app, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear (algorithms? Mischievous intent?) immediately moves from the nascent oeuvre of Elon Musk to the work of a rapper called almndjoy, automatically playing his track Erectile Dysfunction, with its diverting opening line “I’m sorry my dick doesn’t work”. Languishing unnoticed on Soundcloud for a year, it’s seen a vast upsurge in plays since Musk’s track made its debut, replete with a series of comments indicating that “Elon brought me here”. Perhaps that will be Elon Musk’s most lasting musical legacy: he’s brought Erectile Dysfunction to the masses.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jan/31/elon-musk-edm-artist-first-track-dont-doubt-ur-vibe

(there is a very tempting potential explanation for this if you know how recommendation algorithms usually do work for things without many sources of input data, like a brand-new elon musk song before it's been reported)

this might count

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaXDhd2-mwM

I have no clue what the origin of this is (and where volumes 1-7 are) but it seems to be very popular on RYM

Not relevant to this revive but in the original go-round I enjoyed the discussion of how different people's technology played first alphabetical track or first alphabetical artist.

For a long time my wife and I had a shared bunch of music and when sorted alphabetically it always started with ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead.

Many xxxposts on Amazon music:

My grandparents and my parents and their friends bought Alexa, which I find odd because around my age only one person I know has an alexa. At least in my city it’s the people over 50 that are buying Alexa.

Anyhoo, this spike that I’ve noticed this past year in Alexa purchases might be why Amazon music is becoming important and why they can choose which song becomes a hit, most people just say “alexa play some “insert music genre”” which gives Amazon the chance to push whichever track they chose at the beginning of their playlists.

Yep

can't find any info on this weird amateur (?) recording that has 100000 plays on spotify
https://open.spotify.com/track/5lIikHmK6oZSaPw1vsi35S?si=mr9Syo9eTfS_0Lx8Rm-kGg
a glitch in the matrix?

it was on my discover weekly 🤔

it's kind of amazing

yes it's weirdly enjoyable

crossposted from the J-pop thread, CHAI have covered Plastic Love:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhkQgyxzRzI

i guess pavement "harness your hopes" and the galaxie 500 song could count for this

it wasn't a 'hit' per se, but the same year Orgy released Candyass, a band called Candyass released an album named Orgy.

don’t forget green, who came out with an album called rem

REM was a single. And the bassist on it is currently out on $100,000 bond while working on a plea deal.

jesus christ, R.E.M.'s lawyers are brutal.

lol

Hahaha

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a4/Bowi.jpg

god damn that still cracks me up

Not really a system glitch, I guess this is more a case of algorithms working how they're supposed to I guess, but still mostly by accident:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/11/how-old-ambient-japanese-music-became-a-smash-hit-on-youtube/

Just came here to post that. Which came as a suggested article on my phone!

it's now on spotify

https://garbageday.substack.com/p/grieving-on-my-peloton

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-07-19/surf-curse-freaks-tik-tok

“Harness Your Hopes” appears on Spotify’s “Classic Punk” playlist; all the other tunes are decades older (needless to say, it doesn’t fit the theme). Pavement’s official Instagram posted a meme recently about the track’s ubiquity. It really is a weird thing.

this thread is amazing, btw

i have noticed recently that "never too much" by luther vandross pops up on a lot of the spotify playlists i like and i always play them on shuffle (NOT repeat all). it will always play "never too much" multiple times. especially if i need to pause — and then it almost always plays "never too much" next. it's his most played song on spotify by quite a lot. it was a top forty hit when it was released, so i'm not sure how much it factors into this discussion. i just thought it was weird.

The music has been sequenced for CD release in accordance with how the songs were recorded. So don't get your drawers crooked in your butt because songs are in a different order.

shit meant that for liner notes post.

this is a great thread either way. read it.

your drawers crooked in your butt

Pavement went ahead and made a "Harness Your Hopes" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2Ww_O3ceKU