By Jordan Lock
Digital music streaming has now become a front runner in the modern listening landscape, with various platforms rising to the top selling themselves on quick and often free access to new music. Currently the top players in the game, excluding YouTube, are Spotify (170 Million users), Soundcloud (175 Million users), and NetEase (400 Million users). The new developments in music streaming has very likely created a new age in the output of music, one of the biggest would be quantity of songs in the album format. With 100 paid streams and 600 free streams being the equivalent of a single sale, artists and music companies would have more invested interest in publishing as many songs as possible to garner more streams and therefore more sales. In the 2018 Billboard Album Charts, half of the top 10 albums of the year featured more than 17 songs, and number two, Drake’s ‘scorpion’ featured two disks, spanning a total of 25 tracks. I have no doubt in my mind that the recent push of longer album length has everything to do with delivering the most music possible, to allowing for both more songs to accumulate streams, and a higher chance people with differing listening habits to choose their favorite songs and save them to a playlist. Soundcloud’s rise to prevalence has played a huge role in influencing the sound of a modern era, due to the ease of self-publishing on the platform. Many aspiring artists utilize Soundcloud to share their music without much concern for publishing rights, and most without payment. Soundcloud’s promotion of young hip-hop artists has allowed it to cement its place in history with the term ‘Soundcloud Rapper’ becoming a common term in the modern listener’s dialect to label a rapper that came into prominence from utilizing the Soundcloud platform or sounding similar to the associated style of music. Overall, the new mode of streaming platforms has already made a mark in its early life as the new popular method of music consumption.
Source:
https://www.dittomusic.com/blog/how-are-the-music-charts-calculated
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