The Billionaires’ Club: Streaming Music’s New Class System

Spotify has launched a new playlist for tracks that have crossed a billion streams, designed to celebrate top-tier successes on the streaming service; but it comes with as many problems as it does plaudits.

Yet what millions and billions actually mean in the music business have changed dramatically in the past two decades.

School’s Out in 1972 was his first big hit, but Billion Dollar Babies in 1973 was the album where Alice Cooper went stratospheric. In those days, of course, sales in the tens of millions were rare – and they were definitely not going to deliver a pop star a billion-dollar fortune.

Today, however, sales are being steadily replaced by streams and they need to rocket into the billions to generate even close to the sort of money that many people automatically presume most pop and rock stars make. (When advances are still unrecouped and mushrooming marketing costs have to be covered, but managers are still taking their cut, there is often not much left at the end for the pop star.)

But “billion” is the true metric of mega-success in the streaming age. YouTube was the first major streaming platform to use this as a mark of distinction for music. In December 2012, Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ became the first pop promo to cross a billion streams – in a large part due to its hypnotic and hyperbolic video – and slowly but surely others followed suit.

‘Baby Shark’ currently leads the pack with just under 9 billion views, while others like Luis Fonsi, Ed Sheeran, Wiz Khalifa, Katy Perry, Passenger, Adele, Shakira and even Crazy Frog are among the elite acts to have videos join what Silicon Valley memorably termed The Three Comma Club.

Now Spotify has launched a new playlist celebrating the acts on its platform who have had tracks cross the billion-play threshold. It is called, unsurprisingly, the Billions Club and is going to be added to on a rolling basis as the Club welcomes in new members.

Unlike many other audio streaming services – most significantly Apple Music – Spotify makes all plays of tracks (from 1,000 upwards) public so none of this is breaking NDAs with artists or labels. The numbers are all out there; Spotify is just gathering them in one place.

At the time of writing, there were 155 tracks in the Billions Club playlist and they were put in descending order. Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shape Of You’ is number 1 (with 2.8 billion streams), followed by ‘Blinding Lights’ by The Weeknd (2.3 billion) and ‘Dance Monkey’ by Tones & I (2.2 billion).

These are all phenomenally successful tracks, but it seems a slightly misjudged initiative by Spotify when there is growing dissent in the music-making world about a widening class system in music.

Campaigns like #BrokenRecord in the UK and Justice At Spotify in the US are arguing that the streaming economy is so badly imbalanced that it only makes millionaires out of a tiny handful of artists and songs that stream in the billions while the further down the pecking order you go, the dramatically less lucrative it all becomes.

Spotify has been the core target for these campaigns (but the same arguments fired at it can easily be hurled at many, many other streaming services). Much of that ire stems from a statement from Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek in July 2020 where he said: “[I]t’s in our company mission to enable more artists to live off their art.”

A post on the company’s website added flesh to those bones. It read: “Growth in the number of artists making up our top tier – those accounting for the top 90% of streams – is accelerating; that cohort now stands at over 43,000 artists, up 43% from 30,000 one year ago.”

Rolling Stone pounced on this at the time and took serious issue with “Spotify’s own grandiose mission statement” while castigating “its shaky relationship with reality.” It used this to lay bare just how little is left to be shared across everyone else (roughly 3 million creators) not “accounting for the top 90% of streams”.

This has all been repeatedly used as a stick to beat Spotify with ever since, fuelling arguments to move towards a user-centric payment model at the very least rather than rely on the current system of a revenue pool that, some argue, make the rich even richer by allowing them to sponge up most of the others’ shares.

At a time of raging PR battles around the viability of the streaming economy, launching a high-profile playlist that points once again to the handful of acts luxuriating in billions of streams while many others cry penury seems insensitive at best and offensive at worst.

To slightly misquote Justin Timberlake playing Sean Parker in The Social Network: “A million streams isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion streams.” If you are behind one of the 155 tracks on the Billions Club playlist, that is very cool indeed. If you are not, well…