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

Streaming is clearly not more passive than radio, but it's more passive than making the effort to buy a record and playing it - Spotify is basically a mix between "putting money in a jukebox to play what you want" and "listening to radio where the station determines what gets played next".

I mean there must be many older hits that had the equivalent of "a billion streams", i.e. the sum of (records sold x number of times played) + (played on the radio x number of listeners).

Queen has the only music before the 80s on that list and, you know what, good for them

not completely up to date but this has the 10 biggest songs by decade

https://datastudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/74cda77c-f120-40f7-932f-5cdca9d2120a/page/VrXI

Very weird results !

Indeed. One which stands out is that Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”. Peaked at #19 originally, now has 700 million+ streams, more than the streams of his three number one singles combined. No way would I have guessed that would be #1 streamed track from the 1970s.

*1960s*

was it in a movie?

One thing I learned from that billion streams playlist: ignoring their collaboration with The Chainsmokers, Coldplay's most streamed song is 'The Scientist", which barely charted on its initial US release (#18 on the mainstream rock chart, #34 on the Adult Top 40 Chart, didn't even make the Hot 100).

Xpost

Good call, it was in “Guardians of the Galaxy” and in a key scene too.

the diana ross cover being massively successful returned attention to the song, so the relatively minor hit by motown standards made its way onto a bunch of best-of compilations

“ain’t no mountain high enough” also played a big role in remember the titans, fwiw

We've gone through some kind of paradigm shift with streaming video and video social media that comparing a songs performances on the charts back then may be like wondering why such-and-such sheet music bestseller isn't generating cover versions on the jukeboxes.

So, these are all of the 20th-century songs with a billion streams:

1. Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody" 1.59B
2. Oasis, "Wonderwall" 1.22B
3. Queen, "Don't Stop Now" 1.13B
4. Journey, "Don't Stop Believin'" 1.12B
5. Queen, "Another One Bites the Dust" 1.09B
6. Nirvana, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" 1.06B
7. Toto, "Africa" 1.06B

Oh, and this one, which isn't yet on the BILLIONS CLUB playlist:

8. Guns N Roses, "Sweet Child O' Mine" 1.02B

We've gone through some kind of paradigm shift with streaming video and video social media that comparing a songs performances on the charts back then may be like wondering why such-and-such sheet music bestseller isn't generating cover versions on the jukeboxes.

I think this might have been an interesting discussion topic in 1955!

yeah those lists are depressing

That’s not the list that I would have expected on December 31st, 1999. I couldn’t even have put a tune to “Don’t Stop Believin” and “Africa”.

It's funny that Bohemian Rhapsody will increasingly shape what people think of "what pop music typically sounded like in 1975".

idk, I think “Bohemian Rhapsody” is pretty well established as an outlier. It’s even a plot point in the movie

Imagine if the dry run for BoRap, "The March of the Black Queen", had been released as a single and hit it big instead. Actually you'd then have the most played song on Spotify having a racial epithet in it so maybe not such a good idea. When did "Don't Stop Me Now" get so big anyway, by the way?

This seems to suggest it's use in 'Shaun if the Dead' in 2004 as a catalyst for its revival.

https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/8501348/queen-dont-stop-me-now-biggest-hits

Probably a stupid question but who's getting rich off the enormous Spotify plays of Africa, Don't Stop Me Now etc? The bands? Spotify? The record companies? No one?

How the owners of the rights have divided up the revenue, that’s different for everyone.

The Spotify model is roughly like this: payout per stream is ~$0,004 so that’s $4M for a billion streams over the full lifetime of the song so far. That’s gross, but of course you don’t make a hit without some massive promotion expenses. Spotify is clearly not where you make that money back.

How much Spotify takes depends on how much you listen, ie you pay Spotify $16 per month, say you stream 600 songs a month (20 a day on avg) @ $0,004 per stream that’s $2.40 go to the owners of the rights, rest is for Spotify. Obviously, Spotify itself also has costs - last year they spent all of that cashflow (and more) on advertising/marketing themselves.

^based on how Glenn has explained it in the Spotify thread, I don’t think that’s accurate.

it would be good to hear if I’m wrong, but that’s what I see in their quarterly numbers.

None of the main current streaming services set a per-stream rate, all of them actually pay by taking ~70% of revenue for a payment period and splitting it up according to stream-shares from that period. In Spotify's case (and I assume the others), this is actually done for each payment-option in each country, so the money from US full-price premium accounts is split up according to the stream-shares from just those account-holders for that period, same for the Canadian family-plan accounts, the Belgian ad-supported accounts, etc. So this is why the actual effective rates an individual artist sees will vary both across plans and countries and over time.

Probably a stupid question but who's getting rich off the enormous Spotify plays of Africa, Don't Stop Me Now etc? The bands? Spotify? The record companies? No one?

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Sunday, September 5, 2021 5:30 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Joe Rogan

ouch

and what’s “hilarious” is that this deal hasn’t actually worked out very well for rogan - his reach is down, his influence is down. the next deal he makes will be smaller.

Kinda sad that half of the most streamed from the 1950s are Christmas songs. Xmas about the only time anything from the decade gets mainstream exposure anymore.

I would think even flamey shirt GenXers who adore 50s stuff aren’t among those of the generation who’d stream.

To do that old thing – how many people in the 1950s wanted to listen to music from the 1880s?

Fair, I think Satie's Gymnopedies had to wait a decade to really get revived. I'm sure people still dug Tchaikovsky and early Debussy, though.

The local rock station mostly plays stuff from the 21st century but occasionally will throw in something as far back as late '60s like Jimi Hendrix. I can't imagine any radio station I listened to in the '80s or '90s that mostly played recent material occasionally playing anything from the '30s or '40s.

If Twitter is any indication, the new generation really loves Dabussy too

I mean also, it bears being said, that tastes do not conform to strict chronological timelines, possibly thanks to the mediums we recieve it on (i.e. the advent of TV as a monocultural force or the last 20 years of the internet flattening time/stratifying culture)

And Gilbert & Sullivan and Sousa marches still managed to endure!

Sure they endured, but weren’t exactly holding their own in terms of chart popularity (which is what we’re taking about here). Obviously it’s not apples to apples anyway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ouMaLRth-s

(I wish more ppl listened to ‘50s music, I love it, but I’m not surprised that “Kansas City” or whatever isn’t among the top 10000 most streamed songs.)

Jailhouse Rock and Johnny B Goode have ~250 million streams so not terrible for ancient tracks

Honestly the grandpa in 1955 buying an LP of Sousa marches is pretty much an exact analogy to the Boomers on YouTube streaming ‘50s music.

Huge part of this is that by 1975 multi track recording had completely matured and plateaued, so “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Born to Run” don’t have much of a retro sheen, even if the style and genre are older. So these days a lot of 50 year old music can be played alongside contemporary music ( especially if it’s been compressed) without a startling shift timbre and fidelity.

i was going to post something like that bendy, but not as concise. photography keeps getting better and better. it may be ready finally to hit something like a plateau but personal snaps from even 6 or 7 years ago look dated already. movies from the 1990s look dated, both in the film grain and lighting sensitivity but also in the stodgy fixed camera movements. but 'high definition' audio recording already sounded as perfect as it ever needed to sound by the mid-60s (i'd say?) and yes, multitrack recording matured not long after, and by the early 1980s you even had absolutely locked MIDI timings. there is just not a dropoff in quality, even back to blue note and stax and motown. nothing comparable to 4:3 aspect ratios or shooting on film with giant heavy cameras

That's interesting. DAW-based digital audio, esp with mostly DId or in-the-box instruments, does sound pretty different to me from the mic-ed amps recorded to tape you hear on 70s records - often not as good to my ears but definitely different. There have been objective advances in signal:noise ratio and dynamic range but it might be the case that things have advanced beyond what the ear needs, at least as far as pop music is concerned?

I'd argue that those are stylistic choices. You can play to a click track and pro-tools the kick drum onto the grid, the record bass on top of that, add some sampled loops. Or you could mic each drum and isolate from other other musicians playing live, then mix for a "natural" sounding drum track with the push-pull rapport of a live band. But the final recording isn't going to sound more pristine than say, My Life in the Bush with Ghosts or Zuma. Like, aughts lofi rock is lo-fidelity for expedience and lack of access to eight high-end microphones. In one band I was in, we actually borrowed two mics worth more than all our cars combined, but we couldn't get any more quality out of them than a SM57 and a plate mic I borrowed from the work teleconference system, and the results weren't glossy, but they were definately more than lofi.

Re: 50s on Spotify, my mother used to always have good oldies station on when I grew up on the 90s, one that largely played 50s, with a smattering of British Invasion tracks. (Checking now, it’s moved onto “the best variety of the 70's, 80's and 90’s”). I get nostalgic for it sometimes so resorted to creating a large 50s playlist I can put on shuffle, though it has deeper cuts than KLOU did—I trawled old top 40 playlists from the fifties, as I wasn’t eager to recreate the experience of hearing "Chapel of Love" every two hours.

Huge part of this is that by 1975 multi track recording had completely matured and plateaued, so “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Born to Run” don’t have much of a retro sheen, even if the style and genre are older

Curiously, 1940s big-band records sound more recent than they are to my ears, because I associate dense productions with multitracking. But they were able to simulate dense production without multitracking just by having 25 instruments playing at the same time.

blatherskite, that sounds like a good playlist! i have very fond memories of listening to the oldies station in the car with my mom in the 90s, and her gleefully turning up the volume on things she hadn't heard since way back when, or thought I would particularly appreciate.

I do think there's a noticeable difference in classical recordings between the 70s and the present day in terms of dynamic range and noise floor (e.g. between the Boulez pieces recorded in 2003 on Christina Petrowska-Quilico's Sound Visionaries album and the Messiaen and Debussy pieces on the same album that were recorded in the 70s). Agree that the level of improvement matters less with pop music, which tends to have a narrower dynamic range and less silence.

Re: 50s on Spotify, my mother used to always have good oldies station on when I grew up on the 90s, one that largely played 50s, with a smattering of British Invasion tracks.

I don't know if the demographics of Spotify and other streaming service subscribers are available, but I suspect that the boomers who are still listening to 50s and early 60s music are disproportionately not streaming it. I was just in a car with someone in his late 60s who's primary audio panel on his car's screen was Sirius/XM, with the Beatles station, Stones station, 60s station and a couple other oldies ones all bookmarked. His listening consisted of just scrolling through those 5 or 6 stations till he heard something he wanted to listen to. I assume that Sirius/XM subscribership is disproportionately boomers, and they presumably are overrepresented in terrestrial radio listeners as well.