For the first time this year, Spotify Wrapped used Google's AI to make a podcast about users' favorite songs.
Spotify; Getty Images; Chelsea Jia Feng/BI
Some Spotify users this year lambasted the music streaming app's popular year-end round-up, Wrapped.
A former Spotify engineer described what was different about Wrapped this year.
Despite the negative reception, this year's Wrapped was the biggest the company has seen.
When Spotify dropped its viral year-end musical round-up Wrapped earlier this month, the disappointment online was palpable.
"I'm not usually one to complain but this was one of the most boring Spotify Wrapped recaps I've been a part of and I've been a member since 2017," Business Insider reported a Reddit user said.
"Spotify wrapped flopped this year so bad like where are the music cities, the playlists, the top genres or the listening auras… all that wait for WHAT," a user on X wrote.
Spotify superfan Sydney Brown told The New York Times her annual Wrapped release is "like my Super Bowl," but this year, she felt like her round-up was "a homework project that was turned in late."
While the company said a record number of users checked out their Wrapped this year, an engineer who once worked on the feature said he understands why many online were disappointed.
Glenn McDonald is a former Spotify software engineer who worked on projects including Wrapped for over a decade before being caught in one of several rounds of sweeping layoffs that saw a 25% staff reduction.
This year, Wrapped "didn't give me any context," McDonald told Business Insider.
"It didn't connect me to communities or the world, or put my listening in relationship to anything," he said. "So, for me, it misses the important potential of a streaming service where everybody is listening together and just treats it as if each individual listener is listening by themselves."
The Wrapped 2024 round-up skipped the genre stories and cultural comparisons found in previous editions, instead creating an AI "podcast" of computer-generated voices talking through users' listening stats and briefly describing what emotional "era" their listening habits might suggest.
While some users called it a flop, a Spotify spokesperson told Business Insider it was the biggest year yet for the music streaming app's year-end round-up.
"In the first 12 hours this year's Wrapped was the biggest we've seen, up over 26% compared to day one in 2023," the Spotify spokesperson told BI. And while the company tracks user reactions on social media — both negative and positive — internal engagement statistics showed a record number of individual shares "and the biggest volume we've ever seen across the entire experience."
A missed bet on the cutting-edge
Spotify wanted to embrace the cutting-edge features that AI has made possible, the spokesperson said. Still, it did not intend to diminish the humanistic elements of the Wrapped experience that users love.
In prior years, McDonald was on the team that brought Spotify users Wrapped features, including a Myers-Briggs-style description of the way users listen to music, comparisons of their music tastes to cities around the world, and genre stories that revealed the top types of music users were listening to.
He said those cultural elements weren't a priority this year, and the company leaned too much into "AI that doesn't really add anything to your life."
McDonald, a proponent of artificial intelligence who now works for an AI startup, said Spotify has always treated Wrapped primarily as a marketing exercise meant to go viral as users share their results. While he was at the company, he had to push for more community-focused features, he told BI.
"It's sort of hard to try to infuse humanity into a marketing exercise. It's not easy, and you're not always thanked for it," McDonald said.
He pointed to last year's layoffs as one reason remaining engineers may not have felt motivated to go the extra distance this year: "It doesn't surprise me that maybe anybody the following year looking at what happened last year goes, 'maybe I won't stick my neck out,'" he said.
While Spotify hasn't decided what future editions of Wrapped may include, the spokesperson said its features change each year to give users more of what they want.
The future of audiobooks and AI’s impact on the publishing industry were points of discussion for HarperCollins, whose CEO, Brian Murray, spoke at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference on Tuesday. During the event, the exec praised Spotify’s entry into the audiobooks market and detailed its future growth plans in the space. He also […]
Spotify has officially discontinued Car Thing, its in-car streaming device, with all units now disabled, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Earlier today, an X user noticed that their Car Thing is indeed no longer functioning, displaying a message that it’s “no longer operational,” along with a reminder of the refund terms valid until January 14, […]
Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re diving into OpenAI’s surprise 12 days of reveals, an underwhelming Spotify Wrapped, and an app that tells you when you’ll die. 😰 Let’s get into it. OpenAI is getting into the holiday spirit. In a surprise “12 Days of OpenAI” event, the company will livestream updates […]
Some Spotify listeners were frustrated by the recap's aesthetic and missing metrics from years past.
Some also said Spotify relied too heavily on generative AI in the recap.
Spotify Wrapped came out Wednesday, and some of the platform's users are already eager to put it behind them.
The streaming company's year-end recap gives people insight into their listening habits each year, via stats like their top songs, artists, and minutes spent listening.
This year, however, seemed to miss the mark for many. Listeners took to social media to air their frustrations with what they said was an inaccurate or underwhelming year-in-review that lacked the personality and insightful metrics they appreciated from Spotify's recaps of yesteryear.
"I'm not usually one to complain but this was one of the most boring Spotify Wrapped recaps I've been a part of and I've been a member since 2017," one Reddit user said.
This year's Wrapped did away with some of last year's features. It didn't, for example, reveal listeners' top genres or give them "sound towns," which told you a town with similar music taste as yours.
Instead, this year Spotify introduced features like the Wrapped AI podcast, powered by Google NotebookLM, featuring two AI voicebots discussing your listening habits. There was also Your Music Evolution, which gave highly specific, yet also inscrutable, names like "pink pilates princess strut pop" to describe your musical genres in certain months.
Some users felt particularly disappointed with what they saw given they also had to wait longer for their recaps this year. Spotify Wrapped came out on December 3 this year, a few days later than the November 29 release of last year's recap.
"This is what we waited for? This is so lame and anticlimactic. No top genres, no music aura and all the other cool stuff that was there before," another person said on Reddit.
"It's giving turned in homework late for participation points it feels so lame," one person said on TikTok, writing in the video's text overlay that this year's Wrapped felt "inaccurate" and "disappointing."
One user even said they were moved to cancel their Spotify Premium subscription and switch over to Apple Music, which recently made available on a monthly basis its Wrapped equivalent, Replay.
"Spotify wrapped so bad and full of AI garbage i cancelled my spotify and got apple music," one person said on X.
"Wrapped is an experience that fans look forward to every year, and our approach to the data stories did not change this year," Spotify told BI in a statement.
"We celebrated fan-favorite data stories like Your Top Artist and Top Songs with new insights like longest listening streak and top listening day," the company said. "We're always exploring ways to expand Wrapped and bring new data stories to users across more markets."
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the criticisms around the AI features in Spotify Wrapped this year.
Other users who were disappointed highlighted that Spotify underwent layoffs in the last year.
Spotify cut more than 2,000 total employees across three rounds of layoffs last year. In an earnings call this year, CEO Daniel Ek stood by the December cuts as "the right strategic decision" but said it affected daily operations "more than we anticipated."
Spotify Wrapped debuted in 2016 and quickly became one of the most platform's celebrated features, and for many years was differentiated feature against rival music-streaming platforms.
Spotify Wrapped's popularity and easy ability to share the results to social media boosted its popularity and eventually helped pressure Apple to debut a similar recap feature for Apple Music in 2019, which began as a web-only feature.
Five years later, Apple Music finally made the feature available in the app itself.
Spotify Wrapped arrived on Wednesday, packaged in its usual neon, Instagram-ready glory.
The annual release dominates social-media posts for a day, but beneath the colorful cards (designed to be bespoke but distributed en masse), it's Spotify's brag about the amount of data the company has collected on you, mirrored back in a way that's meant to make surveillance sexy, silly, and shareable.
In recent Decembers, the wrap-ification of our data has spread beyond Spotify. Apple Music, Spotify's main competitor, now has a similar feature called Replay, unveiling this year's version on Tuesday. Starbucks has sent out emails telling people about their favorite beverages and number of store visits, shocking some with exactly how many dozens of Frappuccinos they bought. Duolingo kicked off the Wrapped season earlier this week, showing people how many mistakes they made while trying to learn a new language. The British supermarket chain Tesco has sent Clubcard members a review of what they bought in recent years, called Unpacked. And on Tuesday, Tinder hosted a Year in Swipe party, where it revealed the top trends in online dating the app gleaned from its broad swath of 50 million monthly users, which included people getting specific about what kind of person they're looking for or putting a hand emoji in their bios to indicate they're searching for real connections.
All this is getting weird. The type of lattes we drink and the music we listen to are things we fundamentally know about ourselves. The most common names of men and women on Tinder (Alexes and Daniels dominated among men, Marias and Lauras women) tell us nothing about how to find love. But these year-in-review trends still catch avid attention and, in turn, provide free advertising for companies when they're reshared. About an hour after Spotify unveiled this year's Wrapped, its market cap reached $100 billion for the first time. Spotify did not respond to requests for comment.
"People are so excited about seeing data collected from them and then being shown back to them in a way that feels meaningful and relatable," Taylor Annabell, a researcher with Utrecht University who has studied the Wrapped phenomenon, said. "Wrapped taps into this belief we have that data is meaningful and that we want to see it because it helps us understand ourselves."
Wrapped 2024 included the usual unveiling of top songs and artists, but Spotify has added a "Wrapped AI podcast," which features two voicebot hosts chatting through your listening habits without really saying much about the songs, in particular. There was also a section picking apart how listening styles changed over different months of the year. For me, that meant going from "van life folkie indie" to "mallgoth permanent wave punk," mildly embarrassing phrases that might describe my musical tastes from a distance but tell me little new about myself.
Wrapped content has proven so effective on social media that people are making up new categories themselves, packaging parts of their private lives not captured by apps.
Of course, Spotify can't capture everything about your tastes — maybe you played a vinyl record on repeat or shared a streaming account with someone in your family. ("It's not me who can't stop listening to Chumbawamba. It's my cousin, I swear!") Maybe you opted for a mysterious approach and kept your Tinder bio short and sweet.
But where data is lacking, some have set out to create it themselves. Wrapped content has proved so effective and viral on social media that people have taken to making up new categories, packaged parts of their lives not captured by apps, and turned it over to their followers. Here, at least, these people get to curate their experiences and post them as they wish. Last December and already this week, some people took to TikTok to talk through how many first dates they went on during the course of a year, using cute and colorful slideshows to walk their users through their year of bad dates, situationships, and ghosting. A third-party project called Vantezzen takes TikTok data and generates a Wrapped-like analysis for those who want to know how many minutes they spent doom scrolling.
All this comes as people have largely thrown up their hands and given in to sharing their data with their apps. Companies have "gotten us to move past just accepting that they are spying on us to celebrating it," said Evan Greer, the director of the digital-rights advocacy group Fight for the Future and a vocal opponent of Spotify who released an album called "Spotify Is Surveillance" in 2021. "That's the shift we're seeing with this explosion of these types of year-end Wrapped viral gimmicks," Greer added. "They're actually about hypernormalizing the fact that the online services that we use know so very much about us."
Tinder's year in review looked at data from profiles in the US and globally and its own survey results, determining the most popular love languages and zodiac signs, the fastest-growing words mentioned in bios (freak, pickleball, and finance all soared this year), and how people like to communicate (ironically, "better in person" won out over the messaging app). It also created an interactive vision-board feature for people to set intentions for their 2025 dating plans. The company's in-person Year in Swipe party was held in a moody Manhattan bar, where attendees could make charm bracelets or have a tarot-card reading, and each sported a button designed to correspond with their dating vibe, like a black cat or delusional. Tinder did not respond to a request for comment about whether people could opt out of being used in the aggregate data.
But Spotify, in particular, wants to tell its users more about themselves throughout the year. In September 2023, the company began making "daylists," or curated playlists released multiple times throughout the day. While they don't come with the sharable, flashy cards to post on Instagram, they're given catchy names that hint at something about you, changing several times a day. Just this week, Spotify has dubbed me a "Laurel Canyon hippie" and crafted a vibe for a "yearning poetry Tuesday afternoon."
The daylists feel like Spotify's attempt to take the Wrapped success "to the next level," said Nina Vindum Rasmussen, a fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science who worked on the Spotify research with Annabell. It's "data fiction that accompanies people throughout the day," she said, adding: "What does it mean for them to have this mirror constantly shoved in their face?"
Most of us have gotten comfortable with — or at least resigned to — the fact that Big Tech is watching our every move. Wrapped season is a shiny reminder of all we've done, seemingly in private, on our phones. But don't count on your friends to stop sharing their elite spot as a 0.05% top listener of Taylor Swift anytime soon.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
It's neat? But WEIRD!! Very weird!!! No thank you!
One of the indignities inflicted on parents of young children is Spotify Wrapped. Each December, thousands of adults open up their year-end treat to discover the sad fact that they listened to "Baby Shark" more times than anything else.
As a parent, this has been my fate for the last few years. (My Spotify account is connected to our Amazon Echo, which means that in some years, my kids' requests for songs about potty words have ended up on my Wrapped.)
I take very little pleasure in Spotify Wrapped, although I know it's a massively popular thing that many people —presumably those who don't listen to Raffi on repeat — really look forward to.
However, this year, there's a new feature. And I struggle to imagine how anyone won't feel mildly weirded out by it: Spotify uses Google's new NotebookLM AI-powered feature to create an individualized AI-generated podcast with two talking heads discussing your listening habits in a conversational, podcast-y tone. Yikes!
I received a 3-minute podcast with a man and woman chatting about how impressive it was that I had listened to "Cruel Summer" by Taylor Swift — my 4-year-old's current favorite tune, narrowly edging out "Let It Go" this year — so many times that I was in the Top 0.02% of listeners. (I should note here that the podcast said I was in the Top 0.02%, while the main Wrapped said it was 0.05%. Possibly the podcast version hallucinated?)
I can understand why people like sharing screenshots from their Wrapped. It's normal to want to share what music you like — and what those lists say about you and your personality.
But listening to an AI podcast about it? Voiced by robots? I'm not sure anyone wants that.
Google's NotebookLM is a fascinating product — I've played around with it a little, and it is very cool, if not uncanny. You can add in text or a PDF or other kinds of data, and it will create a conversational podcast episode with two hosts — "likes" and "ums" and all.
It's got that factor about GenAI that makes you go "whoa," like trying ChatGPT for the first time to have it write a poem.
It's got the dog-walking-on-its-hind-legs element: It's impressive because the dog can do it at all, not because it's doing it particularly well. The idea that AI could generate a chatty podcast that sounds almost real is, admittedly, mindblowing. But would you want to actually listen to it? I'm not really so sure.
I've wondered what this would be used for — I assume some people find listening to something makes it easier to engage with than simply reading it. You could take the Wikipedia page for "The War of 1812," plug it into AI, and generate an engaging history podcast instead of slogging through dry text.
And in a business setting, perhaps a busy exec could upload an accounting report and listen to it while on the putting green instead of reading a stale PDF. (I tried uploading my tax return and created what may be the most boring podcast in human history.)
But NotebookLM is a pretty niche product so far — and Spotify Wrapped is a massively popular feature on a massively popular app. It's likely that this will be many people's first exposure to NotebookLM's abilities.
I imagine it will be mindblowing for many people! But I urge restraint and moderation. Although seeing a screenshot of your friends' top artists might be fun, no one wants to hear a podcast about it.
After weeks of anticipation, some Spotify users are left underwhelmed by the streamer’s personalized year-in-review feature, Spotify Wrapped — with many even going so far as to call it “boring” or a “flop.” Chief among the complaints are that Spotify prioritized the inclusion of an AI podcast for Wrapped over the other, clever and creative […]
To mark the 10th year of Spotify Wrapped, the streaming giant is celebrating the unique and surprising ways artists and creators have shaped fans' lives around the world. On Wednesday (Dec. 4), Spotify launched its global "2024 Wrapped" campaign, which over the past decade has become the platform's biggest marketing moment of the year and...
Spotify launched a Wrapped AI podcast on Wednesday powered by NotebookLM.
Spotify/Google
Google and Spotify launched a Wrapped AI Podcast with NotebookLM's AI hosts.
The podcast talks about users' listening habits of the year.
The head of editorial at Google Labs said he sees more NotebookLM integrations in the future.
If you've ever thought that your Spotify Wrapped deserved more attention from your group chat or social media followers — the wait is over.
On Wednesday, Spotify launched new features to accompany its annual round-up of users' most listened-to songs.
This year, users will also now get their Wrapped narrated in podcast form by NotebookLM, Google's AI-powered research and writing assistant that provides tools like summaries or study guides based on materials users upload.
The platform recently went viral after it launched its "deep dive," podcast-like discussion hosted by two conversational AI hosts.
The new Spotify feature enlists the voices of the same two AI hosts from NotebookLM's Audio Overview feature to discuss users' favorite artists, songs, and genres from the year.
"This is the first of its kind integration, and it demonstrates the potential of AI to enhance personalized experiences," said Steven Johnson, Head of Editorial at Google Labs, in a press event for the launch.
Users can listen to an AI podcast about their music choices of the year.
Spotify/Google
The podcast is unique to each user, reflecting their personal listening habits from the year, Johnson said. He also said it demonstrates the potential of AI to enhance these personalized experiences — and raised the point that most people don't have on-demand hosts to sit around and talk about their music choices from the year.
"There's a wonderful, robust market for podcasts on many topics," Johnson said. "But having customized top podcasts for millions of individual people based on their specific listening habits for the year, is just not something that you can do with actual humans."
Johnson said NotebookLM has been at the forefront of customizable AI.
He told BI that in the initial wave of AI, people conversed with models that knew a lot about the world, but nothing about the user asking the questions. When a reliable model is able to bring out these insights and make it interesting, that's when you see a change in the way computers can work, he said.
So far, the AI podcast feature on Spotify is only available with Wrapped. However, you can customize your own podcasts on NotebookLM's platform. Johnson also said the team is looking forward to "a lot of different partnerships," both in audio and text.
Just over a month after Google's NotebookLM Audio Overview tool went viral, NotebookLM introduced a "Customize" button, enabling users to guide the AI conversation. Its partnership with Spotify takes that customization a step further.
Google has implemented more personalized features across several of its platforms, including Google Shopping. Google Shopping now provides personalized recommendations and informative briefs at the top of your search. Spotify has similarly launched personalized features like AI Playlist, which creates playlists based on premium users' prompts. This year's Spotify Wrapped will also allow premium users to prompt the AI Playlist feature to create a playlist of their top genres or suggest artists similar to their top 5.
Spotify Wrapped will also include commentary from its AI DJ reflecting your year in music and incorporating insight from Spotify editors on the year's top tracks and artists of 2024.
The new Wrapped AI Podcast feature is available to free and premium Spotify users in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, and Sweden. To find the podcast, you can go to your Wrapped home feed and select your Spotify Wrapped AI podcast.
Spotify Wrapped, the streamer’s highly anticipated annual listening recap, has arrived. In addition to its usual personalized summary detailing your favorite artists, songs, podcasts, and more, the company this year is introducing two new features, including most notably, an AI-powered podcast of your 2024 Wrapped created with Google’s AI summarization tool, NotebookLM. Spotify is also […]
Prince Williams/Wireimage; Bill Clark; Astrida Valigorsky/Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI
If it didn't already look like Drake had lost the feud of the year, it certainly does now.
In a legal filing Monday, an LLC owned by Drake called Frozen Moments alleged that Universal Music Group and Spotify worked together to make "Not Like Us" — a viral diss track Kendrick Lamar released about Drake earlier this year — a bigger hit than it naturally would have been. The petition, filed three days after Drake's rival released the critically acclaimed surprise album "GNX," claims UMG did this by offering lower licensing rates on the song to Spotify in return for promotion, then paying third-party companies to have bots inflate streams of it; "Not Like Us" has surpassed 900 million plays on Spotify. ("Family Matters," a Drake diss track about Lamar released around the same time, has 122 million plays.) The filing also accuses UMG of using pay-to-play tactics to increase the song's radio play and have influencers promote it across social media. It's not a lawsuit yet, but a petition seeking more information about the alleged practice.
"Streaming and licensing is a zero-sum game," Drake's filing says. "Every time a song 'breaks through,' it means another artist does not. UMG's choice to saturate the music market with 'Not Like Us' comes at the expense of its other artists, like Drake."
The twist: UMG doesn't just represent Lamar but also Drake. And Drake is one of the biggest artists streaming on Spotify, with about 10 million more monthly listeners than Lamar. If major companies like UMG and Spotify really are conspiring to help one artist over another, they would be severely disrupting the way people discover and come to love music and risking the entire streaming model the music industry now relies on.
Hip-hop fans are mocking Drake's litigiousness as petty and destructive to his street cred. "This is Drake's Jan. 6," the musical artist and former NFL running back Arian Foster posted on X. Music industry insiders, meanwhile, are skeptical of the allegations themselves.
"It's not in Spotify's interest for their model to be undermined by people not getting paid fairly," Tony Rigg, a music industry advisor and lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, tells me. "Bots, potentially, would undermine both" Spotify and UMG. In other words, for the top of the music industry, rigging with bots would be "not like us."
The kind of manipulation, also called artificial listening, that Drake is talking about does happen. Some artists use third-party companies that enlist accounts made by bots to listen to the same playlist on repeat. That's an issue because of how streaming companies pay. They divide up royalty payments from a limited pool of cash. More plays means more of the pie. And as more people have taken to uploading AI-generated slop to streaming platforms like Spotify, they risk becoming more diluted. In September, a North Carolina musician was charged with music streaming fraud; the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York claims he made more than $10 million using those kinds of tactics. (The case is ongoing.) Smaller artists looking to make money off streaming can suffer. But it's harder to know how it could affect megastars like Drake and Lamar, who are already among the top performers in Spotify's streaming ranks.
In the end, the attention, and ears, on the two artists' beef may have made Spotify and UMG both winners.
There are more than 100 million songs each on popular streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and SoundCloud. Last year, Spotify booted tens of thousands of songs from its platform reported to be generated by AI and also listened to by bots — essentially, computer music for computers. UMG itself has pushed back against AI-generated music, trying to block AI from training on its catalogs on streaming platforms.
Spotify declined to comment, but the company does have policies in place to detect and combat artificial streaming. A UMG spokesperson told me that "the suggestion that UMG would do anything to undermine any of its artists is offensive and untrue. We employ the highest ethical practices in our marketing and promotional campaigns. No amount of contrived and absurd legal arguments in this pre-action submission can mask the fact that fans choose the music they want to hear."
Fans can argue whether Drake or Lamar won the feud. By throwing lawyers and corporations into the rap battle, Drake has made it much less street and much more corporate. It's hard to imagine bots would be driving so many listeners to Lamar, a 17-time Grammy award winner. The song itself has been nominated for five Grammys, has been used at political events and protests around the world, and became a hit on TikTok. In the end, the attention, and ears, on the two artists' beef may have made Spotify and UMG both winners.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
The rapper's music company has accused Kendrik Lamar's label of artificially inflating the popularity of the song "Not Like Us' using bots and illegal payment schemes.
Spotify on Tuesday introduced a new set of tools for authors and publishers distributing their audiobooks on its platform with the launch of Spotify for Authors. Similar to its existing efforts, Spotify for Artists and Spotify for Creators (previously Podcasters), Spotify for Authors will allow writers and publishers to track insights and analytics about their […]
The long-standing feud between rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar is heating up. Drake — via a business entity called Frozen Moments LLC — filed a petition yesterday in a New York Supreme Court accusing distributor Universal Music Group (UMG) of artificially inflating the popularity of “Not Like Us,” Lamar’s recently released “diss” track directed at […]
Lauren Harris; KAPFHAMMER; Matt Jelonek/Getty Images; Katy Cummings; Chris Burnett for BI
On a hot summer night in downtown Manhattan, Raye was exhausted and excited. The British pop singer had just finished a series of performances of her new single "Genesis" as small groups of devoted fans cycled in and out of the Conrad hotel. She'd barely stepped off the stage before a member of her team handed her a plaque to commemorate the sale of 2 million US copies of her 2022 single "Escapism."
By nearly any metric, the 27-year-old singer and songwriter is a star on the rise: 2 million Instagram followers, 27 million monthly Spotify listeners, three Grammy nominations, a single-year-record six Brit Awards, a writing credit on Beyoncé's most recent album, and coveted performance slots at Coachella, "Saturday Night Live," and Taylor Swift's Eras Tour.
But in 2024, artists who want a sustainable career can't survive on talent or even fame alone. They now have to strategically post on social media, design cost-efficient tours, and navigate the complex web of legal and financial bureaucracy necessary for their work. And oftentimes, even that's not enough to turn a profit.
"We're breaking even and it's beautiful," Raye says in one of the Conrad's many boardrooms, one hand resting casually on her plaque.
Music has always been a business, but streaming, TikTok, inflation, and the ballooning costs of touring have dramatically altered a musician's traditional routes to making money.
Even the world-famous billionaire musician Taylor Swift has acknowledged she can't focus on songwriting alone to build her career. "I'm sick and tired of having to pretend like I don't mastermind my own business," she told Rolling Stone in 2019.
"You've got this democratization of the music business where there's not the same barrier for entry. The problem is that everybody's got that access," says Donald Passman, a veteran music lawyer who is the author of the music-industry bible "All You Need to Know About the Music Business."
"The real challenge for artists now is to get yourself an audience before you go to a label, if you decide to go to a label at all," Passman adds. "You've got to do it yourself."
Or as Kevin Baird, the bassist of the Northern Irish indie rock band Two Door Cinema Club, tells me: "You have to be the CEO of your company. You have to understand what is going on in every single facet of the business."
Raye is nominated for best new artist and songwriter of the year at the 2025 Grammys.
KAPFHAMMER; Chris Burnett for BI
A chart-topping hit — or 2, or 3 — isn't always a golden ticket
The formula for success in the music industry appears simple: Release a hit song, climb the charts, rake in the cash.
The reality, of course, was never that straightforward. Predatory record deals existed way back in the 1950s, when, for example, Chuck Berry was forced to split the songwriting checks from his first hit, "Maybellene," with people he'd never met. But a lot has changed since streaming usurped radio play as the kingmaker of a rising musician's career.
Streaming numbers can help a song top the charts or act as a bellwether for internet virality, boosting the artist's profile in the process. But while it's still possible to live lavishly off the back of one song, like a classic sitcom theme or a holiday staple, that's the exception, not the rule: Whether the artist actually makes money on a song depends on a myriad of factors, including complex copyright rules.
Royalty distribution — how artists and others who own copyrights get paid — is a many-headed beast, but reliable industry estimates have put Spotify's payout rate at less than half a cent per stream, while Apple Music in 2021 was said to have told artists it paid about one penny per stream.
Even the hitmakers who dominate your "For You" page are getting paid "almost nothing" from TikTok, as one music exec told Billboard. (Apple Music and TikTok didn't respond to requests for comment. A Spotify spokesperson directed me to a Q+A section on their website, which notes, "In the streaming era, fans do not pay per song, so we don't believe a 'per stream' rate is a meaningful number to analyze.")
Tayla Parx cowrote multiple hits with Ariana Grande, including "Thank U, Next" and "7 Rings".
YouTube; JC Olivera/Getty Images for BMI; Justin Ayers; Chris Burnett for BI
There are perks unique to the streaming era — Two Door Cinema Club's Baird notes that it provides a level of granularity to data about listener interests and tastes that can help artists decide how to market and create music — but mostly, it's a lot of work for not a lot of payoff.
The veteran songwriter and performer Tayla Parx knows this problem acutely. In addition to her solo career, she's cowritten plenty of earworms, including two of Ariana Grande's biggest hits on the Billboard Hot 100 — "Thank U, Next" and "7 Rings" — and Panic! At the Disco's top-five hit "High Hopes."
But songwriters typically only take a small slice of the small streaming payout: Billboard reported in 2022 that, on average, songwriters could expect to earn 9.4 cents for every dollar a streaming service paid in royalties. If more than one writer is credited — "Thank U, Next" has eight — they all split it.
It's also not standard practice for songwriters to charge a base fee for their work. That means if Parx spends eight hours writing a song with a pop star, but that song ends up on the cutting-room floor, she's earned nothing for that full workday.
Parx tells me her biggest slice of income doesn't come from her work as a performer or as a Grammy-nominated lyricist. Instead, her bank account is buoyed by a shrewd investment outside the music industry.
"What I can make off of one of my rental properties from a one-month or two-month rental could pay for a whole tour," says Parx, who self-released her third studio album, "Many Moons, Many Suns," in July through her umbrella company, TaylaMade Inc. "That's very different than showing up in the music industry for work every single day for free."
Record labels can offer cash up front — but artists still need a solid business plan
For musicians to actually profit from their work, revenue — which includes royalties — must outweigh expenses. The problem? Recording an album can be eye-poppingly expensive.
Muni Long, a Grammy-winning R&B singer and songwriter who's also written hits for artists such as Rihanna, Kelly Clarkson, and Fifth Harmony, recently gave an interview to Apple Music 1's Nadeska Alexis in which she broke down how expensive it could be to write and record an album.
By her back-of-the-napkin estimation, which included studio costs ($1,200 per 12-hour block, plus a session engineer at $75 to $100 an hour), mixing and mastering (anywhere from $2,500 to $10,000 a song), and paying for beats (anywhere from $5,000 to $40,000), the baseline cost to record a full-length album like her 2022 breakthrough, "Public Displays of Affection: The Album" would be about $300,000.
"That eliminates 75% of the people who are aspiring," Long said. "I didn't realize how much money that it takes to actually be an artist."
Of course, these are estimates of the cost to record an album within the mainstream music industry, something artists are increasingly forgoing. But these numbers illuminate what still makes a major-label record contract so appealing: Getting cash up front gives the artist freedom to make music without worrying about the often astronomical price tag — at least not right away.
I don't know how I'd be able to do all of this and then have to think of the cost.
Rachel Chinouriri
For the London-based singer-songwriter Rachel Chinouriri, signing to Parlophone/Atlas Artists in the UK was the only way she could afford to make music her full-time job.
Not having to worry about the cost of making her debut album gave Chinouriri the space to focus on the music while getting her career off the ground. She says her debut album, "What a Devastating Turn of Events," wouldn't exist in its current form, with its high-quality production and its glossy cover art, without her label's investment.
"I've never had to sit and think, 'How much has this studio session cost?' When I did my album, I don't even know how much the producers got paid — it just was done," Chinouriri says. "I don't know how I'd be able to do all of this and then have to think of the cost."
Labels typically offer an advance as a signing incentive, which they expect to recoup over time. The actual dollar amount depends on many factors — the artist's social-media following, how well their music is projected to perform, and the length of the agreement, to name a few. Some contracts offer an additional sum to record an album, which can easily total $250,000 or more for pop and hip-hop artists, per Passman.
Though Chinouriri did not share specific details of her record deal, she did say that despite tens of millions of streams on Spotify and critical acclaim, she still is being loaned money from her label and is not yet in the black. "The plan is to recoup and hope that this thing or brand that we have will eventually start bringing in profit," she explains.
Sam Halliday, Alex Trimble, and Kevin Baird formed Two Door Cinema Club in 2007.
Katy Cummings; Chris Burnett for BI
But is Chinouriri's situation typical? The better question may be what a "typical" record deal even means these days.
Derek Crownover, who specializes in IP rights and other music-related assets at the law firm Loeb & Loeb, says that out of thousands of label contracts he's helped negotiate, advances have ranged from $0 (if the artist wants to keep their masters, which are the original sound recordings of their songs) to $5 million (if executives believe the artist is destined for superstardom).
"It's really all over the map," Crownover says. "A record deal right now is, 'We're going to write out a business and marketing plan for this artist, and we need funding for it.'"
Without a good business plan, Crownover adds, good luck getting noticed: "You might be able to break through because you're sheerly talented, but that chance is getting smaller and smaller."
The alternative — working outside the major-label system — can yield more creative control, but it requires artists to compete with Goliaths.
Even being the No. 1 song on TikTok doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things.
Simonne Solitro, Tinashe's manager
Ten years after making her first appearance on the Billboard Hot 100 with "2 On," from her major-label debut, "Aquarius," the alternative R&B singer Tinashe reemerged this summer with "Nasty," her first bona fide hit as an independent artist.
The song's hypnotic chorus first took off as a TikTok meme, which helped it climb the charts. Italso gave Tinashe's team the confidence to invest more than usual in a radio campaign and more leverage to land high-profile media placements and lucrative brand deals.
That was only the beginning.
"Even being the No. 1 song on TikTok doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things," Tinashe's longtime manager, Simonne Solitro, explains. It needs to translate to dedicated fans who will spend hard-earned cash. For Tinashe, that meant doubling down on "Nasty" with a remix EP, releasing her new album "Quantum Baby" on the heels of her hit song, and taking advantage of the buzz by embarking on a world tour.
"It's a lot of pressure, especially for her," Solitro says. "Her peers are Doja, Normani — all the big, amazing, pop-R&B girls — and they all have 70 million times larger budgets for these things and she still has that expectation for herself."
"She doesn't want the product she puts out to be like, 'Oh, yeah, that's my version of a budgeted video,'" says Solitro, who declined to estimate budget numbers. "She still wants it to be that caliber of a project."
Live shows are key to building a dedicated fan base, but many artists break even or finish tours in the red
Going on tour is a way to build a connection with fans, but it's hardly a guaranteed money-maker. Nearly all artists who aren't Taylor Swift are getting hit by the rising costs of touring.
In a market flooded with demand in the wake of the pandemic, costs for everything from bus rentals to hotel rooms to hiring a lighting technician or manning a merchandise table have ballooned. (Not to mention that venues take a cut of merchandise profits these days, too — sometimes as much as 40%).
When artists as big as Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny, and The Black Keys are canceling tour dates or entire tours amid reports of weak ticket sales, what hope is there for everybody else?
Tinashe's longtime manager says many indie artists finish tour "very much in the red."
Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage; Matt Jelonek/Getty Images; Chris Burnett for BI
Tessa Violet, a Los Angeles-based singer, songwriter, and former vlogger who's been performing live for a decade, estimates she hasn't made a profit on a tour in roughly six years. "That's not just me," Violet tells me, "that's literally every single artist I know."
While fan complaints about rising ticket costs abound, Violet says very little of that sum is going to the artists. They have no input on those notorious service fees, which are split between venues and behemoth sellers like Ticketmaster and StubHub. Meanwhile, the base ticket price goes toward things like production, marketing, and booking costs. Promoters also take a cut of sales, and that's all before the crew gets paid.
Even for a signed artist like Chinouriri, the stacked costs have proved insurmountable. One month after we spoke, she canceled her planned US tour dates, citing the "financial risk it would entail."
If touring is a logistical and financial nightmare, why bother?
It goes back to Tinashe's manager Solitro's risk-reward assessment. A well-executed concert is an investment that promises to yield something every business owner wants: consumer loyalty. It can deepen the connection between performer and listener and, the performer hopes, invite new fans into the fray.
"Establishing a direct connect like that — an actual 'in real life' connection with fans — that's what gets people dedicated champions of you for the long haul," Solitro says. "They're the ones that will continually stream your music."
Violet puts it more simply: "It's the best high in the world."
Musicians must be social-media influencers, not just performers
For independent artists like Violet, building a following for your music online is a new reality that comes with the territory. "Somebody can't be a fan of something they don't know exists," Violet says.
Tessa Violet's new single, "My Body's My Buddy," recently went viral on TikTok.
Sarah Pardini; Chris Burnett for BI
Social media has changed the game for musicians at all levels, signed or not. The chart-topping pop star Halsey made headlines in 2022 for accusing her label, Capitol Music, of holding her new song hostage until she could manufacture a "viral moment" for its release. (Capitol later apologized and released the single in a show of support; a year later, Halsey was dropped from the label. She's since signed a new contract with Columbia.)
For Chinouriri, being on a label meant having to build and maintain an online following to show her value to label execs. "I had to put in the legwork of three to five TikToks a day for over a year just to prove that I'm worthy enough of keeping on the label," she says. Atlas Artists declined to comment.
A high-profile cosign can be a godsend in the pursuit of growing a following. Chinouriri, who's earned shout-outs from stars like Adele, Sophie Turner, and Florence Pugh, noticed a spike in her online engagement after Pugh starred in the music video for her single, "Never Need Me." The music video's announcement in January racked up more than 600,000 likes on Instagram, nearly five times Chinouriri's follower count at the time. By the end of that month, Chinouriri's monthly listener count on Spotify had grown by more than 300,000, according to data provided to BI by Chartmetric.
Chinouriri said that Pugh had freely offered her time and acting chops and that the two had become friends — a friendship that she said started when they followed each other on social media. All those posts and DMs became worth it.
Still, social-media savvy can do only so much to help you stand out amid erratic algorithms, the perpetual demands of content-hungry fans, and the crowds of other talented musicians jostling for attention.
"There are three things you need to be a successful artist," Violet says. "One, you need great art. Your art needs to be better than your influencing, so it needs to be really exceptional. Second, you have to be a salesman. And for people who are artists entering the influencer world, that's a really hard pill to swallow."
"The third thing," she adds, "is you have to be lucky."
