Play by Play

If you need random anecdotal proof of the death of the album—the continued existence of TAYLOR SWIFT, KENDRICK LAMAR and SAULT notwithstanding—may I direct you to SPOTIFY's version of Lamar's 2017 album DAMN, on which, if we are to believe the numbers in front of our eyes, the lead track, "BLOOD," is by far the least-streamed track? Yes, it's a two-minute spoken-word track with a buried beat, but how in the world could side 1 track 1 be the least played track on any album in a world where the concept of side 1 track 1 exists? Surely there are enough Luddites out there who automatically hit the first play button they see and, therefore, start at the beginning. And yet we know users neglected "Blood," whose 88 million plays in four years is a rounding error next to the 731 million plays enjoyed by track 2, "DNA," thanks to Spotify's most recent desktop update, which has moved individual track play counts out from semi-hiding to the center of the screen on every album page. It's now impossible to look at an album and not immediately know which tracks everyone plays on repeat and which ones everyone thinks are clunkers—or, perhaps, which tracks have been elevated by Spotify's army of curators and algorithms and which ones haven't.

Luddite that I am, I'm not a big fan of this particular update, which all but encourages newcomers to any given album to skip the same tracks everybody else skips and play the same ones everybody else plays—regardless of the reason, algorithmic or not, for the skips and the plays. "In true jerk-Darwinian style," writer MICHAELANGELO MATOS tweeted Monday, "it makes those songs' spikes increase all the more while the rest are left for dead." The lemmings school of music discovery.

The heightened attention to play counts, which previously couldn't be seen unless you hovered over a song title and moved your cursor to three unmarked dots on the far right of the page, is also a curious point of emphasis. The same prominent real estate could have been used for the songwriting or production credits that labels, publishers and artists have been begging services to display for years. But the credits remain hidden behind those three unmarked dots, requiring even more work to find than play counts used to. For any given song, you have to hover, click on the dots and then click on the "show credits" option on the dropdown menu that appears. If you want to know who wrote every song on a 20-track album, you have to do that 20 times, and who in the history of Spotify, besides me and possibly JACQUI LOUEZ SCHOORL, has ever done that?

Play counts, which the service obviously has to record for royalties purposes, have their uses for music fans. They allow us to quickly see an artist's five or 10 most popular songs, for example. That's helpful. But most of us don't need the granular, album-by-album, track-by-track data, and I'm reasonably sure most of us would happily trade it out for credits. Show us the writers or the producers, then let us hover or click on that to see the rest. It's worth noting that no major service is good at this. But the takeaway here is if any of them wanted to find a place to display that information, they could find it in a heartbeat. Possibly smack in the middle of every page.

For their part, the services routinely complain that labels and publishers don't reliably and consistently give them the metadata they need to make credits work. But they've also never given them a compelling reason to get better at that.

One other curiosity about those play counts. Detroit News film critic ADAM GRAHAM noticed that "PAUL," a skit on EMINEM's THE MARSHALL MATHERS LP, had accumulated a grand total of 2,282 plays during the life of Spotify—as opposed to the song before it, "STAN," which as of Monday had collected 393 million plays. That makes no sense. It turns out Spotify, which requires users to listen to at least 30 seconds of a song before considering it a play for royalty purposes, doesn't register the play at all if a user spends less time on it. So super-short tracks like "Paul," which checks in at 10 seconds, aren't credited for a play even if a user listens all the way through. (As for where those 2,282 plays came from, I'm waiting for Spotify to get back to me with an explanation, though here's a reasonable theory in the meantime.)

Dot Dot Dot

The WEEKND, who vowed to no longer submit his music to the GRAMMY AWARDS after he was snubbed in this year's nominations, says the RECORDING ACADEMY's decision to eliminate the secret nominating committees presumably responsible for the snub doesn't change anything for him. "I remain uninterested in being a part of the Grammys, especially with their own admission of corruption for all these decades," he told Variety. "I will not be submitting in the future." The Academy, it should be noted, hasn't admitted to any corruption, though it's been accused over the years by both insiders and outsiders... SQUARE's acquisition of TIDAL has closed, at a reported final price of $302 million... When he died, MICHAEL JACKSON's image and likeness were worth $4 million, his music catalog was worth $107 million and his 50 percent stake in the publishing giant SONY/ATV was worth nothing because of outstanding debts, a federal tax court judge ruled Monday. The ruling settles a long-running dispute between his estate, which said the King of Pop died something of a pauper with a mere $5.3 million in total assets, and the IRS, which put the figure at a princely $482 million. Lawyers for the estate called the ruling "a huge, unambiguous victory for Michael Jackson’s children," even if he wasn't quite as poor as they'd been led to believe.. LUCINDA WILLIAMS tells Rolling Stone she suffered a stroke in November and has temporarily lost the ability to play guitar. But she believes she'll be fully recovered in time to be back on tour this summer.

Rest in Peace

Dance music producer PIERCE FULTON.