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Can Someone Please Tell Me Why We Still Care About Song Of The Summer?

This article is more than 8 years old.

The verdict is in. As flip flops are solemnly stowed away, fall flannels and rain coats make their debuts, every music rag in the nation anoints one track or another the Song of the Summer – most of them settling on OMI’s sleeper smash “Cheerleader.” But frankly... so what?

There’s no doubt about it, “Cheerleader,” was a massive hit this summer. With the original track released more than three years ago, a Felix Jaehn remix blew new wind into its sails, and set it soaring up the charts. The track hit the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in July, and hung around for quite some time. From June to September, “Cheerleader” attracted close to 60 million YouTube detections, about 70 million spins on Pandora , and more than twice that on Spotify. OMI himself peaked at number 5 on the Billboard Artist 100 chart, and seeded close to 700,000 stations on Pandora this summer.

OMI’s closest competition in the race for song of the summer was probably Wiz Khalifa - whose collaboration with newcomer Charlie Puth on “See You Again,” from the Fast and the Furious 7 soundtrack also spent several weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, 12 in fact, before being dethroned by “Cheerleader.” Of Khalifa’s more than 300 million spins on Pandora in the past three months, about a third were for “See You Again,” and the number of streams on Spotify are comparable to that of “Cheerleader.” (Note that Khalifa had a leg up on OMI in terms of reach, given that his is of Epic proportion. One might have expected him to far outperform the lesser known artist.)

In focusing on the success of individual tracks, aren’t we kind of missing the point?  The new reality of how fans are discovering and consuming music hasn’t just affected the purse strings, but also the entire approach to releasing music. Drops are more frequent, a minimum of 4-5 singles are promoted as part of an album, and EPs are rising in popularity versus the LP for debut artists. If you want to build a sustainable career as an artist, the key lies in capitalizing on the momentum and awareness, and building a catalogue of content for fans to return to time and time again.

This has been precisely the strategy around an artist like Fetty Wap, who in the run-up to his long-anticipated album drop (which just happens to be today: September 25th) has released a steady stream of hits. His breakthrough track “Trap Queen” has attracted more than 100M spins on Pandora in total, but “679” and “My Way” (both of which were released this summer) have already attracted 67M and 81M spins respectively. Also on Spotify plays for “Trap Queen” made up less than half of his total over the summer.

Fetty’s growing catalogue of hits is reflected in his expanding reach. In the past 3 months, Fetty has seeded close to 4 million stations on Pandora, more than 8x that of OMI (In fact, only Drake has had more Stations seeded than Fetty Wap so far this year, with Miss Swift coming in a close third). As for social, Fetty added about a million new followers on Instagram, close to half his total, and 17x that of OMI. And while Fetty’s particular talent for Instagram is well known, he also far outpaces OMI's growth on both Facebook and Twitter .

Another name that merits a mention is Abel Tesfay, better known as The Weeknd, who has just been wailin ‘em out of the park. In fact Beauty Behind The Madness was so successful that every track on it hit the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop songs chart. He has spent 49 weeks on the Artist 100 chart, and currently holds the top slot. In the past three months, The Weeknd seeded 2.7M new stations on Pandora, and spun more than 380M times - with top tracks including “Earned It,” “The Hills,” and “Can’t Feel My Face.” He counts more than 1BN views on YouTube in total and has averaged more than 7 million plays a day on Spotify in the last three months, with a significant spike in activity around the album drop in late August.

And this is a pattern, not an anomaly. For more examples, just take a look at last summer when Iggy Azalea took the world by storm with “Fancy.” She didn’t stop there. At one point she had three tracks in the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100 (So did Ariana Grande for that matter), racking up more than 220M spins on Pandora, and more than 4M stations added over the course of the summer.

Think of it as diversification. Artists who consistently deliver content that fans want to consume see more activity, and ultimately take home more money. If the music industry is a pay-per-stream battlefield, it starts to make less sense to highlight individual tracks that performed well (often one-hit-wonders) and instead highlight the artists that are establishing a foundation and building a sustainable career.

In other words, I’d rather celebrate the Artist of Summer than any single song. It just makes a lot more sense.