The Micro-Chop Daily X #20 —1 Million Streams and Counting
A Micro-Chop playlist featuring 10 hand-picked instrumentals — every single day for an entire year.
Weighing the pros and cons of streaming is a frequent and often heated debate in many corners of the music industry. Between the payout model, the power streaming platforms give tech giants to drive our listening tastes and choices, and the uncertainty about the overall long-term sustainability of the streaming model, there are so many issues to unpack that the topic tends to overwhelm people.
Since starting Micro-Chop during the summer of 2016, my personal thinking on streaming has changed and evolved quite a bit. When Spotify first came onto the scene, I was pretty anti-streaming. I didn’t fully understand how it worked and thought that it was basically designed to screw over artists. There are still many aspects of streaming that concern me, but I also see the benefits and potential benefits that it can provide artists.
Before we look at the positives streaming can provide, lets look at Spotify through a critical lens for a moment. The company has a very successful playlist culture and the enthusiasm for beat/instrumental playlists grows by the day, which is a positive in many ways. Their Mellow Beats playlist — which now has over one million followers — can put a producer on the map if their music is selected by the Spotify staff. It has certainly helped more than a few producers have a single instrumental song surpass one million streams. But there are plenty of valid critiques of Spotify’s popular beat/instrumental playlists and the fairness regarding how they’re assembled and curated.
Mellow Beats tends to lean a bit heavily on already well-known producers who have already found Spotify success and don’t necessarily need a playlist feature to break through an incredibly competitive and crowded market. As of this writing, J Dilla currently has 7 of the 108 beats featured on Mellow Beats. I love Dilla with all my heart, but this seems a bit excessive. All of his 10 most-listened to songs on Spotify already have well over 1 million streams and 4 out of 10 have surpassed 5 million streams. Couple that with his almost mythical status within the beat scene and he’s guaranteed an incredibly healthy streaming existence for a very long time. It’s great to see his work being respected by those tasked with compiling Mellow Beats, but I’d personally like to see a couple of his tracks knocked off for some lesser-known but deserving producers.
There’s also a growing concern about the whitewashing/gentrification of the beat scene. I frequently see producers who I follow on social media point out that playlists are becoming increasingly dominated by white producers, often in the lo-fi space, while non-white producers aren’t given the same representation. This argument seems to hold up against the various eye tests that I’ve conducted during several explorations of Spotify, though I admittedly have not done a comprehensive study.
For starters, I’ll speak my informal observations. I’m going to avoid using specific names here, but I’ve seen white producers who are newer to the beat scene have at least half of their songs generate 1 million streams or more on Spotify. Meanwhile, a black artist who is revered by many producers and was instrumental to the formation of the early beat scene will have only one or two songs break the 100,000 mark. The reasons the numbers play out like this can be varied and complicated, but they’re important trends to pay attention to and ask tough questions about.
I don’t want to say that the white producers I’ve observed aren’t deserving of their streaming numbers, I actually enjoy many of the artists I have in mind as a write this. It’s more that the discrepancy between their success and their non-white peers is often pretty glaring to me. I don’t know enough about the Spotify staff responsible for putting together these playlists to comment on the diversity of it, but whatever the makeup of the group, they should be aware of issues regarding race, gender, and fair representation on their instrumental playlists. As producer eu-IV pointed out in a recent tweet, a good way to help improve the balance would be to increase artist involvement with curating playlists. If given the chance, producers could point some of the great artists that the Spotify staff is currently overlooking and help them get in the mix.
The aspects of Spotify and streaming in general that deserve thoughtful criticism go beyond the aforementioned items, but for the purposes of this article, I’d like to shift to some positive aspects of streaming. Last night I was listening to some Common right before I started working on this playlist. When I went to look at his 10 most-listened to songs, I was a bit stunned to find the “1999” instrumental on the list. The fact that Common — a very successful Hollywood actor and a respected rapper for over a quarter century — has an instrumental as one of hist most-listened songs is kind of nuts.
In the days of old, the instrumental version of “1999” would have been relegated to a limited number of 12" vinyl singles that a select group of DJs and collectors owned. Motivated folks seeking the beat could have found it through a vinyl rip somewhere online or recorded a copy from a friend’s record. Now, with the advent of streaming, an instrumental to a 19-year-old common song can be an important part of his canon and one of his most listened to songs. That’s pretty cool for Hi-Tek, the producer of “1999”.
Another remarkable part of the Spotify/streaming story is Oddisee’s “After Thoughts” from his 2013 release The Beauty In All. On November 20th, 2017, I wrote about how the song had eclipsed 11 million streams. Here we are less than a year later and the song is rapidly closing in on 16 million. The fact that a beat from an instrumental album can earn a successful rapper/producer three times as many streams as his next most-played song (“That’s Love”) says volumes about how widely the interest for beats and instrumentals has spread. I wouldn’t be surprised if “After Thoughts” breaks 20 million plays midway through 2019, which is a head-exploding figure.
I say all of this as a rather long-winded way of letting producers know that although Spotify and other streaming platforms are far from perfect, they are an important part of getting your music in front of people. And if you get enough followers and wind up on some big playlists, it can be an unbelievable signal boost for your work. Some might argue that getting on a big playlist doesn’t necessary equal a new group of die-hard fans, but it seems to act as a funnel for perspective listeners and often leads to an overall spike in numbers for producers who get picked up. Yes there are areas of Spotify that need improvement, but that doesn’t mean you should write off streaming completely.
To underscore how many producers are finding large groups of listeners on Spotify, I’ve compiled 10 songs that have at least 1 million streams on the platform. It’s a pretty interesting mix of producers representing a broad variety of styles. There are so many producers that have 1 million Spotify spins or more that I’ll definitely have to make multiple volumes of the 1 Million Streams and Counting playlist. I hope you enjoy the first one.
The twentieth playlist in The Micro-Chop Daily X series features the following artists, with each name hyperlinked to bring you directly to their Bandcamp, SoundCloud, or website: Seneca B, eevee, Elaquent, Oddisee, Hi-Tek, DJ Jazzy Jeff, TOKiMONSTA, Kev Brown, Flamingosis, Tall Black Guy.
Be on the lookout for The Micro-Chop Daily X #21 dropping tomorrow.
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