Streaming Numbers No Longer Reflect Reality

For the third month in a row, Spotify has deducted a significant amount of streams from tracks across genres. Artists like Kendrick Lamar, Doechi, Joeboy, and Teni, to name a few, have been caught in this purge. Davido's recently released fifth album 5ive, however, took a massive hit, losing some 18 million streams. There are two main reasons why streaming platforms deduct streams, especially large amounts. The first reason is that the artist in question artificially boosted the numbers using bots that artificially mimic human behavior. This is referred to as “farming” in internet-speak, which is a hilarious way to characterize the clandestine action of artificially inflating one’s streaming numbers, given that the origin of the word traces to virtues like hard work and patience. The second reason is that the artist in question violated the platform's terms of service through infractions such as paying for playlist placements. Either way, a sizable deduction is indicative of streaming numbers manipulation. 

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We could throw stones all we want, hurl invectives, reprove these artists for setting a negative precedent, but that would all be performative because we have known for a long time, albeit with marginal evidence, that the global music industry is steeped in fraudulent streaming practices. Davido, being one of the hardest hit, has become the object of public indignation, just as Wizkid, his soulbrother/nemesis (depending on what day of the week it is), became the subject of intense trolling over his slew of cancelled shows. He is, however, hardly alone in this, and for a while now, streaming charts have been far removed from reality, so much that they have become a little more than symbolic. 

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There’s a case to be made that a lot of the time, record labels are behind this inflation of streaming numbers. Proponents of this theory argue that these labels do this to skew public perception in favor of their artists. This is the position that Drake has maintained in his lawsuit against Universal Music Group, which Drake claims to have artificially inflated Kendrick Lamar’s streaming numbers, helping him gain the upper hand in their beef last year. The argument that labels are mostly to blame hardly exonerates fans, after all, the only reason this practice continues to flourish is that music fans of this day have an unhealthy obsession with numbers and records.

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We all share a part of the blame. This is a monster of our creation, a beast we fed and tended to which has now escaped our control. Remember that Friday in 2022, when Burnaboy dropped Last Last, Davido dropped Stand Strong, and Asake dropped Palazzo? Remember how we styled that release day as something of a battle royale and settled on Apple Music Top 100 performance as the defining metric. Not quality. Not impact over time. Not cultural resonance. Instead, we settled on a blanket metric that could satiate our need for instant gratification, our desire for speed over the kind of certitude that can only come with time. Remember how Davido and his fans celebrated being the first to top Apple Music Nigeria chart—indeed, Davido posted a screenshot of Stand Strong topping the chart on his Instagram story—even though in the long run Stand Strong would not have the enduring impact of the other songs. Asake and DJ Spinnal’s Palazzo continues to be a club staple, while BurnaBoy’s Last Last has elevated to the rarified pantheon of the most successful Afrobeats songs. 

What can we take from all of this, if anything? At the risk of sounding too optimistic, I would say that the middling state of streaming charts across the world, which is in no small part due to the rise of streaming fraud, offers us an opportunity to divorce musical brilliance from commercial performance. If the authenticity of numbers and milestones on streaming services can no longer be taken at face value, then perhaps we have no reason to invoke streaming numbers when appraising the quality of a musical number or project. 

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Admittedly, this is easier said than done. Even the most number-obsessed music enthusiasts know, on some level, that the quality of a piece of music is independent of its commercial performance. We, however, live in a hyper-capitalist society—and I use the word “capitalist” here in the cultural sense—that forces us to consider nearly everything through the lens of quantifiable metrics. Even music and the arts, which by definition are ineffable, in that they, at least ideally, defy simplistic quantifications, have not been spared from our generation’s obsession with numbers. In music conversations on X, casual fans trot out streaming numbers and chart records, statistics in general, with a precision and forcefulness that makes one wonder if we’ve not all unwittingly become music execs. This focus on vanity metrics has stripped music conversations on social media of their lighthearted air, instead reducing them to a little more than a stilted exchange of statistics. The silver lining in all of this is that perhaps this situation might jolt us out of our numbers obsession and lull us back into simpler times when first week streams and monthly listener count didn’t factor into our appreciation for music. 

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