Streaming does not measure relevance

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We’ve recently covered a few different cases of how engagement numbers for music don’t exactly reflect real listening habits. Sometimes the algorithms of TikTok and Spotify will sweep away a popular song faster than anyone wants, sometimes it’ll keep a hit atop the charts for months longer than expected. What’s the common factor here?

Well, last month, we got another clue thanks to Macklemore and Ed Sheeran. After Macklemore spoke in support of a free Palestine while opening for Sheeran on tour, Sheeran was pressured into firing him by Robert Kraft and other owners of venues where the tour was scheduled to play. The story turned into a major news event we could track around social media, but our Spotify data suggests it didn’t actually make a big difference for any of the artists involved. So what gives?

After Macklemore was fired, he ended up as Instagram’s fastest growing account in September, gaining over 2.8 million new followers according to Social Blade. He also gained over a million new TikTok followers (for perspective, more than Dolly Parton in the same timeframe). On Spotify, though, the engagement numbers didn’t look nearly as seismic. Largely because he was already mega-popular before any of this happened.

Macklemore is in a small, exclusive class of artists whose biggest hits will always stream at new release numbers on Spotify. Archive data from Kworb shows that songs like “Thrift Shop” and “Same Love” have been on and off the charts for years. At least one of his songs has been in the global Top 200 since February, when “Can’t Hold Us” broke in and has remained there ever since. We’re not certain why the song got a boost of attention in February — our best guess is this popular Instagram post might have helped — but in August, it reportedly became the single most streamed hip-hop song in all of Spotify’s history. And when Macklemore made his speech on September 4th, “Can’t Hold Us” was on the Spotify charts in at least 15 countries.

When Macklemore was removed from Sheeran’s tour on September 14th, more listeners followed. Within two days, “Can’t Hold Us” went from the 120th biggest song on Spotify to the 51st, gaining over 600,000 more daily streams around the world. The song’s most popular day was September 18th, when it was streamed over 1.8 million times and charted in 30 countries.

Which is an important point to look at further because now we naur about the Australian base behind Ella Langley’s Spotify success with “Choosing Texas.” Similarly, separating out the countries reveals some interesting patterns to Macklemore’s new audience. For a start, the United States, by far Spotify’s biggest market, was a relatively negligible part of the spike. “Can’t Hold Us” peaked at 95 on the US charts on September 15th, and as of October 1st, it’s already dropped off completely. Which doesn’t line up with how much attention this story has gotten in the press.

In other words, Spotify charts don’t seem very reactive to the news in either direction. “Can’t Hold Us” had its best post-Sheeran bump in Switzerland, where it peaked in 4th place, but it had been in the top 20 all month. In every country where we have Spotify data, the song’s popularity after Macklemore and Sheeran’s split was dependent on its popularity before the split. If it was low on the charts, its growth was limited; if it was already popular, it stayed popular. With one big exception.

In Ireland, “Can’t Hold Us” went from number 154 on the Spotify charts to number 29, a leap that we didn’t see anywhere else in the world. Ireland has been important to Sheeran’s tour since it started. His backing band on the tour was Beoga, an Irish folk band who co-wrote Sheeran’s hit “Galway Girl.” Several of the tour’s other acts were also Irish, including Aaron Rowe and Finneas O’Connell. There’s a lot of cultural and political solidarity between Ireland and Palestine — last week, Taoiseach Micheál Martin spoke in support of Palestinians at the United Nations — and so it felt like a particularly pointed move from Sheeran, who’s English.

The day after Sheeran announced Macklemore was dropped from the tour, Beoga and Rowe both announced they were quitting in protest, citing their Irish heritage as the main reason. Within 24 hours, they were joined by O’Connell and all of Sheeran’s other supporting acts. And in that time, according to Billboard, both Beoga and Rowe had the best streaming numbers of their entire career. But since they didn’t have the same pre-existing Spotify foothold as Macklemore, that didn’t mean as much.

Billboard says that on their best day, Beoga got around 27,000 streams, and Rowe got 80,000. Impressive for them, but that’s a tiny fraction of Macklemore’s gains in the same timeframe. Meanwhile, it’s a rounding error for Sheeran, who’s not just Spotify royalty like Macklemore, but a crown prince. According to official rankings, he’s the sixth most streamed artist ever, and “Shape of You” is the platform’s second-biggest song. And our data corroborates Billboard’s early findings that the whole controversy had basically zero effect on his streaming numbers. Through Macklemore’s meteoric rise, “Shape of You” held steady at around 1.5 million global Spotify streams a day, and stayed there through the entire month. Which is the biggest strike against all of these Spotify numbers.

Simply put, Spotify is not a machine that is capable of measuring relevance. Looking around the internet, this is the biggest cultural story of the month, but we only noticed it on Spotify at all because the two main parties already had songs in the platform’s permanent rotation. The Irish artists who form an important part of the story don’t make any footprint on the data because they haven’t spent a decade being played in waiting rooms and Ubers. Which isn’t great news for anyone who thinks streaming is capable of reflecting real listening trends.

Macklemore announced a new “Free Palestine Tour” for later in October, with three shows (beginning in Dublin, naturally) that all sold out within a week. He’s the hottest act there is right now, but you’d never know it from looking at his popularity on Spotify, where “Can’t Hold Us” is already regressing to the mean. This isn’t necessarily a problem for Spotify, which has only leaned further into passive listening in the last few years. But it really is a problem for the music industry, which has become ever more insistent that streaming data are the tea leaves that unlock the zeitgeist. These numbers are not the pulse of culture, it’s the music that plays in a doctor’s office.