Spotify Launches A New Backstory Feature

Spotify has teamed up with a company called Genius in an effort to try to take using the platform to the next level.

G enius provides annotated song lyrics, backstory and commentary that pops up as you stream a track via special "Behind The Lyrics" playlists.

The commentary comes from the artists and is not crowd-sourced or user generated. This allows artists to stay more connected with their audience without having the work required of a social platform.

The feature is just being rolled out, with the "Behind The Lyrics (Hip Hop)" as the first playlist.

What's especially interesting is that the feature will be available to both free and premium users, which seems to show that Spotify is a bit insecure with its current top position in the streaming world.

With Apple Music's recent leak about its 10 million paid users and Pandora's pending purchase of Rdio's infrastructure out of bankruptcy, this seems to be a pre-emptive strike to either keep its current users from thinking about another platform, or lure some new users away from the others. Either way, Spotify wants to keep as many eyeballs, free or paid, glued to the service as possible, and the connection with Genius is another step in doing so.

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Most Played Artists On Beats 1 During Its First Month

There's been some grumbling about the music being played on Apple Music's vaunted Beats 1 global radio station after the first month. For one thing, it appears that the music is repeated in 12 hour blocks so it's not truly a 24 hour station.

Secondly, it's hardly global in that almost all of the songs played are from English speaking countries. Finally, the tastes of the DJs seem to lean heavily towards hip-hop and alternative.

Here's a list of the top Beats 1 artists and how many times they were played in the first month of the station.

You can find a lot more interesting data about the Beats 1 playlist in the Quartz article.

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How Spotify Helps A Song Become A Hit

The other day Spotify director of economic development Will Page showed some data about how the service can be front and center in helping a song become a hit, using Lorde's "Royals" as an example.

The gist of the example is that playlists are one of the primary reasons that a song takes off on Spotify. When people add a song to a playlist they create, it's almost the same as word-of-mouth in that other people check out the song and potentially add it to their lists as well.

As with so many hits these days, that can help a song get a groundswell, but it takes a celebrity or someone with high visibility to add it to their playlist for the song to explode. In the case of "Royals" it was Spotify's Sean Parker who added it to his Hipster International list which pushed the song to hit status almost overnight.

The interesting thing here is that this is really no different from hit making on radio going back to the 50s. If a DJ started playing a song in a major or secondary city, the song would begin to break out as other DJs would add it to their playlists because it was suddenly got hot.

The fact of the matter is that it still requires some sort of a unexpected break for a song to become a hit, it's just that the break now may come online instead of over the air.

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3 Tips To Make The Most Of Spotify

There's been a lot of discussion over the financial value of Spotify for artists, and while that subject alone is worth a number of columns (I've written a book about it, in fact), the fact is that you can make money on the platform. How much money naturally depends upon the number of plays a song gets, and if there are others (like a record label) getting a split of the revenue.

Since it all comes down to how much you songs are getting played, here are a few tips on how to maximize your plays.

1. Include your Spotify destination in all communications with your fans. That includes newsletters, websites, blogs, posts and emails. The more people that know where to find your music, the better.

2. Create Spotify playlists. Playlists are a great way to help fans discover your music. You can post some that consist of only your songs, but it's better to mix in other songs from other similar artists or artists you like.

3. Release your music to all platforms at the same time. It makes no sense to give an exclusive to iTunes or another platform (even though they didn't ask for it) for a period of time before it's available on Spotify. Having your music available on both at the same time will reinforce your numbers on both platforms.

Remember, your music is your marketing! The more people that hear it, the better it is for any artist or band as it increases the demand for your catalog, show tickets and merch. Don't hold back your music from subscription platforms because the income is small right now. If people like what they hear, you'll find it will increase soon.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.