Blog: playlisting

Apple Music celebrated the milestone of hitting 100 million songs this week — “more music than you can listen to in a lifetime, or several lifetimes”, global head of editorial, Rachel Newman, wrote in the announcement .

In this era of access to all music and everything about it, I do enjoy reading artist interviews, and pay attention to artists’ views on the modern music industry. What caught me recently were Mark Ronson’s remarks on songwriting in the age of the playlist in The Guardian: “Everything has to be produced so it sounds competitively as loud as possible coming out of an iPhone or as loud as possible when it comes out of a Spotify hits playlist; you have to make sure the kick drum and the guitar have the same loudness and presence all the way through the whole fucking song or you don’t stand a chance.

MIDiA is proud to partner with DiMA on its inaugural Streaming Forward Report. Digital distribution, andstreaming in particular, has been transforming music business in recent years. Although digital business models had already transformed content marketplaces prior to the rise of streaming, it is the rise of streaming services that really flicked the switch on this radical transformation.

I write this week’s blog conflicted between the music fan who grew up on the album and the MIDiA analyst looking at the numbers (an eternal struggle). Alongside the feature-length film, the LP was one of the definitive artistic mediums to emerge in the 20th century, but it was also bound to the same business framework of many enterprises of the period; factory-powered mass production methods with the product demand side stoked by television and radio.

Released over the weekend after much delay, Drake’s More Life project is setting records across the board on streaming platforms. The Canadian artist described More Life as ‘a body of work bridging the gap between major releases’ and positioned the release as neither a mixtape nor an album, but rather ‘a playlist’.