You Need To Be On Spotify

Maybe YouTube is not king.

As of this moment, Mike Posner's "I Took A Pill In Ibiza" has 200,912,604 streams on Spotify. But nowhere near this count on YouTube.

The Vevo/YouTube clip has 37,303,201 views.

The next most watched YouTube clip of the SeeB remix, which is the track we're talking about here, has 1,697,208 views.

The one after that, 1,399,712 views.

Then there are seventeen clips with views between 100,000 and a million, almost all of them covers. Proving, once again, that fan-created clips are your friend, you get paid on them too, don't take them down.

But the cumulative number on YouTube is nowhere close to the 200 million streams on Spotify.

Now let's go to Justin Bieber's "Love Yourself. It's got 470,378,996 streams on Spotify.

On YouTube, the Vevo clip has 473,103,375 views.

Lukas Graham has 252,848,507 streams of "7 Years" on Spotify, but only 56,907,403 views of the official music video on YouTube and 42,217,563 of the lyric video, together nowhere close to 252 million.

So...

Maybe there's an explanation, maybe there's something I'm not seeing.

And there's the issue of YouTube adoption in the rest of the world, it's not as big for music overseas, and I'm giving you international numbers here, it's a worldwide business.

Then there are the issues of genre and audience. Adele's "Hello" YouTube views far outpace the Spotify streams. The clip has 1,389,801,721 views, there are only 464,430,885 streams of the songs on Spotify. Then again, the entire album isn't on Spotify. And who knows how many playlists it was on. (However, YouTube is free to all, there's no sign-up necessary, it's a larger pool of people.)

But it certainly appears if you're a pop act, appealing to youngsters, you're doing a disservice to your career by not being on Spotify. Where not only your hard core fans can find you, but others experience you via playlists. Furthermore, could it be that Spotify subscribers utilize the service like a CD player/turntable, listening to the tracks over and over, more than those do on YouTube?

The Apple Music numbers are not public.

Never mind Tidal or Rhapsody.

Then again, Spotify has the most subscribers.

If you keep your music off the service you're leaving your fans unsatisfied.

Then again, you might be into cash more than exposure.

Gwen Stefani's new album debuted at number one with 84,000 units sold, supposedly 90% of them pure sales. So, you've got some serious billing there.

But the official video of "Make Me Love You" has only got 6,413,194 views on YouTube in a month. The audio only video has got another 2,937,596 views. Still, these numbers are paltry compared to those of the acts above, even if they've had a longer chart history.

Maybe "Make Me Like You" is a stiff, maybe being on Spotify wouldn't help, but by searching for dollars has Stefani hurt her career? After all, the recorded music is a loss leader for the tour, the merch, the sponsorships. And let's not forget, the revenue for Spotify streams is going up, up, up. Needless to say, Posner, Bieber and Graham will be getting big checks.

If you're interested in mass audience, if you're interested in discovery, you've got to be on all the services day and date, especially Spotify.


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