| 1 | Tulip | "Assassins" | single | There's operatic metal and symphonic metal and Tulip have an ex-opera-singer and frequent orchestral flourishes, but in context those things basically just keep this tense, pounding song out of metalcore territory. |
| 2 | Frozen Crown | "In a Moment" | Call of the North | We are living in an era of absurd and glorious abundance for metal as melodic/rhythmic maximalism. |
| 3 | Nereids | "Fight for the Fallen" | single | Nereids have, as I write this, 17 monthly listeners on Spotify. |
| 4 | Mission In Black | "What Does It Take to Be Alive" | single | As best I have been able to tell, there is essentially no end of astonishingly good metal bands waiting for you if you want to go looking for them. |
| 5 | Infinitas | "Xana" | Xana +1 | Every time I figure out some improvement in algorithmic techniques at work to help the world's collective listening self-organize |
| 6 | Evermore | "Forevermore" | single | I point it at the most not-yet-famous metal bands I know, |
| 7 | Sefirot | "El Encuentro" | single | and I find more. |
| 8 | Haunted Gods | "Descending" | Haunted Gods | Frozen Crown are giants, relatively speaking: 100,000+ listeners and comfortably among the 100,000 most popular artists on Spotify worldwide. |
| 9 | Ember Sea | "Shine (My Dying Star)" | Shine (My Dying Star) +1 | These others are fond dreams of love waiting for their turns in our sleep, |
| 10 | Lodestar | "Polaris" | single | practicing their band-photo glower for provisional audiences of thousands |
| 11 | Lumsk | "Det Døde Barn" | Det Døde Barn / Das Tode Kind 2 | or hundreds |
| 12 | Frozen Crown | "Far Away" | Call of the North | or tens. |
| 13 | Rides In ReVellion | "MORE THAN WORDS" | single | Spotify has a stated goal of helping a million creative artists make a living from their art |
| 14 | a crowd of rebellion | "ALVA" | single | by reaching a billion fans. |
| 15 | ALICETOPIA | "The latter part of the NIGHTMARE" | single | If we grant that a corporate mission-statement has to be memorably succinct, |
| 16 | NEMOPHILA | "RISE" | single | then these are almost the numbers that have to be. |
| 17 | JIEMEI | "DORODARAKE HERO" | single | It would sound ludicrous to say that you have a goal of helping 26,700 creative artists make a living |
| 18 | Axelight | "RISE OF FRONTIER" | single | by reaching 2.43 billion human fans and 6 cats who have figured out how to use credit cards. |
| 19 | Nanoka | "NO! NO! NO! (First Rhythm Version)" | First Rhythm | Current official figures put the listening audience at 500 million, so we're halfway to the billion. |
| 20 | MAISONdes | "もういいもん" | single | A billion fans supporting a million artists suggests that a thousand fans are sufficient to fund one artist, |
| 21 | ReoNa | "Weaker" | HUMAN | which is probably an unhelpful formulation, since it implicitly treats artists like something only the rich would have more than one of, |
| 22 | アカネサス | "Kodoku" | Now I'm 19 6 | but if we tolerate it for thought-experiment purposes for a moment, it's at least abstractly plausible. |
| 23 | anewhite | "どうでもよくなれ" | single | Averaged across the various plans and discounts and currency rates, the average Spotify listener generates somewhere on the order of $50 of royalties per year, |
| 24 | illiomote | "Wake up soon" | single | and if your band can make $50k from Spotify in a year, maybe your income from all sources is enough for music and music-related activities to be your job. |
| 25 | yuragi | "Worthy of.." | single | The obvious holistic problem with this simplistic equation is that it assumes fans and thus income are distributed evenly. |
| 26 | SpecialThanks | "96" | single | They are, clearly, not. |
| 27 | HANDSOME ACADEMY | "MAYBE BABY" | single | Taylor Swift has 80 million listeners: 1000 to support a humble daily subsistence for her |
| 28 | Motohiro Hata | "Paint Like a Child" | single | and 79,999,000 to pay for her to fly around in a private jet while 79,999 artists who they could have supported instead watch from the windows of their day-jobs. |
| 29 | Takehito Koyasu | "Pink no Buta no Chiisana Yume" | single | Current official figures put the number of artists earning $50k+ from Spotify alone at 17,800. |
| 30 | Cup of Joe | "Tataya" | single | Linear extrapolation indicates that if 500m listeners in their actual distribution of love |
| 31 | Happiness | "Terobsesi" | single | can support 17,800 artists, then to support a million artists with the same social mechanics we need 28 billion listeners. |
| 32 | Signals In Airwaves | "Strict Ang Parents Ko" | Unang Hudyat | UN projections, uncooperatively, have global population peaking somewhere between 10 and 11 billion by 2100 or so. |
| 33 | Story Of The Year | "Afterglow" | Tear Me to Pieces | I have absolutely no authority over my employer's PR strategy, |
| 34 | The Fucking Champs | "Dale Bozzio" | single | and am temperamentally unsuited for anything that requires confidently unexplained assertions about the future. |
| 35 | Flyying Colours | "Do You Feel The Same?" | single | But I also think music is what humans do best, |
| 36 | Yws Gwynedd | "Dal Fi Lawr" | single | and that bringing all the world's music together online is the greatest cultural achievement of my lifetime so far, |
| 37 | Killing Joke | "Full Spectrum Dominance" | Full Spectrum Dominance +1 | but that we're only barely at the beginning of understanding how to convert this vast collective potential into justly distributed collective joy. |
| 38 | VIVA | "Genau hier" | Genau hier +1 | In that context the billion/million framing seems most useful to me because it is so patently preposterous compared to where we are. |
| 39 | Diagnóstico Binario | "Mil razones" | single | How many people should be able to make a living from music? |
| 40 | Valiente Bosque | "La Tormenta" | single | Another of my many interrelated projects at work involves facilitating the collective self-organization of all the world's music |
| 41 | La Habitación Roja | "Vuelve A Empezar Sin Mí" | single | through listening patterns, by calculating an automatic associative network of artists according to their shared fans. |
| 42 | The Sun | "Un buon motivo per vivere" | Qualcosa di vero | Recently I've been pushing on the limits of this data, trying to find the point below which there ceases to be enough listening signal for intelligible induction, |
| 43 | Vaho | "Sintigo" | single | and empirically the answer appears to be 5 fans. |
| 44 | El Columpio Asesino | "Perlas" | single | If you, as an artist, have enough fans that you share at least 5 of them with some other artist, |
| 45 | Juan Magán | "Bye" | single | there's a decent chance that this pairing will seem at least vaguely non-random to at least one of you, |
| 46 | Grasias | "Arde Europa" | single | and so maybe we can treat this as a lower practical bound. |
| 47 | Nena Daconte | "Me iré" | Casi Perfecto | However many people we imagine spending their lives making music in better worlds than we currently inhabit, |
| 48 | Marta Soto | "Cómo me gusta" | single | the number of people stubborn enough to make music that reaches a community of listeners, |
| 49 | Paula Koops | "mejores amigos" | single | in the tiniest sense of community, |
| 50 | Soraya | "La Cita" | single | despite the inhospitable conditions that so far prevail, |
| 51 | Yarea | "En mi lugar - Día Internacional de la Mujer" | single | is about 2.5 million. |
| 52 | Laura Pausini | "Un buon inizio" | single | But by the time you get to 2.5 million, you get to artists like me, |
| 53 | Maria Mena | "Not Worth It" | single | and not even I'm arguing that I ought to be able to earn a living from my music. |
| 54 | ReoNa | "メメント・モリ" | HUMAN | My lifetime royalties are comfortably into the triple-figures, |
| 55 | Carrie Underwood | "Out Of That Truck" | single | and I really thought I had the potential for a minor breakthrough with my recent electric-kalimba song about Cambridge street-names, |
| 56 | Christine and the Queens | "To be honest" | single | but last I checked I still hadn't quite made it to $4.00. |
| 57 | Æ MAK | "Shimmer Boy" | single | If fan-patterns can connect more like 20 artists, though, |
| 58 | Hatchie | "Rooftops" | Rooftops +1 | then maybe that's a better proxy for the level of artists who might deserve professional support, |
| 59 | Taylor Acorn | "Certified Depressant" | single | and the number of artists with 20 peers in my current experiments is, |
| 60 | Carlie Hanson | "Hopelessness" | Wisconsin | coincidentally but evocatively, |
| 61 | carobae | "till the day i ___ (feat. LØLØ)" | scared to go to sleep (deluxe) | about a million. |
| 62 | Meet Me @ The Altar | "Try" | Past // Present // Future | Public Spotify figures show the ascending counts, over time, of artists reaching various yearly royalty levels, |
| 63 | Ravenna Golden | "On My Own" | single | from $10m (40 in 2022) down only to $1k (232,500 in 2022), but if you have the patience to graph these and freehand the curves a little further into the unknown, |
| 64 | Güneş | "10.000 Parça" | single | you can estimate that the millionth most popular artist on Spotify today probably earned something like $50 in Spotify royalties last year. |
| 65 | Ayben | "Hele Hele" | single | It's not just that we're not yet to our goal, it's that we're not getting there at this rate. |
| 66 | Sana | "Palanut maa" | single | The sneaky insinuation of Spotify's mission statement, and I point out again that I have no organizational input into this nor authority to make statements about its corporate intent, |
| 67 | Petite Noir | "Finding Paradise" | Finding Paradise +3 | is that it implies radical change. |
| 68 | Brothel | "All I Wanted" | single | To go from 17,800 artists barely supporting themselves, and the millionth artist not even earning a full workday of minimum wage, |
| 69 | enjoii | "No Pain" | single | to all the musically-viable artists we already have freed to focus on their music, |
| 70 | 93FEETOFSMOKE | "conversations" | conversations +2 | we have to fundamentally change the role of music in our moral and actual economies. |
| 71 | Siiickbrain | "BLOODPUDDLE" | BLOODPUDDLE +1 | 2% tweaks to publishing shares, 5% fluxes in allocation methodologies |
| 72 | Dead Shape Figure | "Torn Asunder Worn Ideals" | single | and 15% hikes in family-plan prices are not counter-productive, |
| 73 | JILUKA | "OVERKILL" | single | but on the scale of our social goals they're sadly immaterial. |
| 74 | Osada Vida | "Billy" | single | At least one of two much more fundamental things has to happen: |
| 75 | Yes | "Cut from the Stars" | single | either individual fans of music have to be compellingly invited to pour an order of magnitude more money into the existing money-channels, |
| 76 | Winger | "Proud Desperado" | single | or else other collective social-structures have to inject that missing order of fiscal magnitude from some other direction. |
| 77 | Enter Shikari | "Bloodshot" | Bloodshot +2 | The companies that broker the current flow, like the one I work for, have inevitable incentives to think in the former terms, |
| 78 | Daeria | "Maléfica" | single | but as the workers that do or don't comprise those companies |
| 79 | Periphery | "Wax Wings" | Periphery V: Djent Is Not A Genre | we are still human before and after the temporary alignments of commerce. |
| 80 | Keep Of Kalessin | "Katharsis" | single | Asking streaming to have already solved this problem, or its glass-half-empty correlate of blaming streaming for having caused it, |
| 81 | Mork | "Tilbake Til Opprinnelsen" | Tilbake Til Opprinnelsen +1 | is a performative exercise in grudge-wielding that supports no rational scrutiny. |
| 82 | Moongates Guardian | "II" | Incompleteness X | As of 2022 the recorded-music industry has surpassed its CD-era peak in face-value dollars, |
| 83 | Gorod | "Chrematheism" | The Orb | and has recovered to about two-thirds of that peak in inflation-adjusted terms. |
| 84 | Isole | "Vanity" | Anesidora | The other way of saying this is that never in human history has recorded music, as a business, been more than half again as big as it is now. |
| 85 | Afraid of Destiny | "Anti" | single | There were not a million artists living off of their music in the goldenest of golden years of the CD boom. |
| 86 | Reverorum ib Malacht | "Och canel och timjan och salfwa och rökelse och win och olja och semlor och hwete och boskap och får och hästar och wagnar och kroppar och menniskors själar." | Emet Amen : The dark night of the faith | Returning to that gold might get us from 17,800 to 26,700, |
| 87 | E-An-Na | "O, romaniţa" | Alveolar | or our millionth artist from $50 to $75. |
| 88 | Aethyrien | "Varðlokkur, Caller of Spirits" | single | Anybody arguing for a return to old ways might as well claim that as their uninspiring goal. |
| 89 | Osi And The Jupiter | "Hollowed" | Hollowed +1 | The preposterous "million" is not a stock-market come-on or a fiscal-quarter projection, |
| 90 | ro.t | "Jag känner dig" | single | it's a diagram of a wrecking ball, |
| 91 | Phathizwe Ntuli | "Ufishi omkhulu" | single | or a call for interesting diagrams of potential wrecking balls, |
| 92 | Sgwebo Sentambo | "Anoqaphela Bafana" | Umlando Uyaziphinda | or, at the very least, an online wrecking-ball catalog browsed through in a non-incognito tab left provocatively open, |
| 93 | Abangani Abahle | "Bhinca Lami" | Bhinca Lami +1 | albeit with a so-far un-checked-out cart. |
| 94 | Masinga Sgqoko Sembongolo | "Amabhinca" | Ekoneni | I don't control Spotify business decisions, |
| 95 | Sphithiphithi Dlamini | "Imnandi Lento" | single | but individual Spotify or Apple or Google or Amazon decisions are unlikely to be the milestones in our future history. |
| 96 | Mkholwane | "Uyagula Umtanami" | Choose Mayikhethele | Billionaires wield the power to have themselves moved around the planet in the fastest planes, |
| 97 | Nomfundo Moh | "Amalobolo" | single | but the rest of us stay where we are, |
| 98 | Msaki | "Zibonakalise" | Synthetic Hearts | or else we get up and move. |
| 99 | Slikback | "FROST" | H I K A R I 5 | We improve not by quantifying OKRs, but by internalizing more hope than dissatisfaction. |
| 100 | Tomás Urquieta | "Taro" | Calatea - EP 4 | We make better futures not by writing the specification for how they will operate, |
| 101 | 111X | "Downward Spiralling Motion" | Shame | but by dancing carelessly into them and then refusing to leave or stop. |
| 102 | Holly Waxwing | "The New Pastoral" | The New Pastoral | The new pastorals might be the old brutalisms, |
| 103 | Rachika Nayar | "hawthorn" | single | or might be something we didn't yet know to fight over. |
| 104 | Fatima Al Qadiri | "Fidetik (I Lay Down My Life For You)" | Gumar EP 4 | Fatima Al Qadiri is a gift to humanity. Data suggests we are receiving this gift ungratefully. |
| 105 | Msaki | "Hearteries" | Synthetic Hearts | Msaki, I just checked, is the 17,537th most popular artist on Spotify as of yesterday, so maybe she just makes it into the fortunate 17,800. |
| 106 | Cruel Diagonals | "Vestigial Mythology" | single | All of our mythology is vestigial by its nature, and of course this includes the mythologies of CDs and record-stores and whatever existed before software companies and before major labels and before records. |
| 107 | Caroline Shaw | "and the swallow" | single | But this much I feel sure of: we won't make a more musical world by listening to music more laboriously. |
| 108 | Alex Paxton | "SweetWishes" | single | We won't make it by bickering grimly over the control of what we already have, |
| 109 | Wes Borland | "We Are the Airlock" | Mutiny on the Starbarge | or by obsessively triaging each other's motives. |
| 110 | Andrea Belfi | "Pastorale" | Eternally Frozen | We will do it by picturing ourselves at the overlapping edges of countless imminent eras of absurd and glorious abundance, |
| 111 | Pauline Oliveros | "The Well" | The Well & The Gentle | and then learning how to gather them all together and up as we enter into their intersections. |
| 112 | Reverorum ib Malacht | ".letipaX .81" | Emet Amen : The dark night of the faith | We will do it by learning to hear their noise-floors as solid ground, |
| 113 | P Money | "Skarzz" | Novelty / Skarzz Freestyle 2 | and their indignant improvisations as labyrinth exit-maps. |
| 114 | SASASAS | "20 Seconds To Comply" | single | The new machines might be the old fields. |
| 115 | TOSZ | "Soldiers" | single | This isn't a war, |
| 116 | Emma Hewitt | "WARRIOR - Extended Mix" | WARRIOR 4 | it's a wave. |
| 117 | Midas Fall | "Dancing in the Dark" | single | And we could use, yes, we could use just a little help. We'll get it. We are it. |
| 118 | ReoNa | "SACRA" | HUMAN | Remember this. Remember this pain. We'll think of it fondly, but rarely, when it's gone. |