Disclosure: Media Evolution paid for my airfare and hotel. This story is part of our coverage of the Media Evolution conference in Malmö, Sweden this week.
I went ahead and embedded Lorde’s song Royals below, but I can’t take responsibility for it staying in your head for the rest of the day. For instance, last week Lorde reached the top 10 on Billboard’s Alternative music chart - the first time a female lead musician has done so in 17 years. It also suggests that Spotify is actively helping to diversify hit songs across the board.
Page’s data shows that Spotify is actively pushing people to legitimate options (rather than piracy) for finding and listening to new music. That means people really only needed to hear a piece of the song once or twice, and then went looking for it themselves. People were more likely to listen to Royals by adding it to their own playlist or by searching for it on Spotify. Page said Lorde’s song saw a major shift in how it was being discovered in the aftermath of gaining attention from Parker. I certainly didn’t realize that he was the reason I ended up hearing the song on the radio in Austin, Texas days ago.
Any action that pushes a song into the mainstream view would have the same effect. But the moral here isn’t to get noticed by Parker. Parker is someone in the public eye, which helped push Lorde’s song into the mainstream. “The important observation here is that, yes, the song broke through from a playlist, but once that happened, sharing kicked in, and people began discovering it on their own,” Page said during a panel discussion about the evolution of digital media distribution at the Media Evolution event in Sweden.
However, when Spotify’s Sean Parker added Royals to his “ Hipster International” playlist back in April, the song went super nova - grabbing a significant increase in listener activity over the next 24 hours and pushing her to the second most popular song on Spotify two weeks later. Using the recent example of the hit single “ Royals” from New Zealand singer Ella Yelich-O’Connor (aka Lorde), Page explained that sharing on Spotify was pretty evenly distributed between people adding the song to playlists, listening to the song on other people’s playlists, and finding it via Spotify organically (via search). Image Credit: Photo by Tom Cheredar/VentureBeat
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