Over the weekend, streaming service Spotify made an announcement on social media, declaring that singer Taylor Swift had achieved the distinction of being “the most-streamed artist in a single day in Spotify history.”
Furthermore, her album “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” had become the most-streamed album in a single day on Spotify for the year.
Swift had previously held the title of the most-streamed artist in a single day, a record she set back on October 21, 2022.
This month, Swift and Jack Antonoff celebrated the achievement of their song “Cruel Summer” reaching No. 1 on the charts, four years after its initial release.
Swift has undeniably dominated the music industry this year, with her highly successful tour reportedly propelling her to billionaire status and her concert film setting records. Swift’s influence in the music world remains unwavering.
Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek, has revealed that there will be no complete ban on AI-generated content within the music streaming platform.
Earlier this year, the platform removed a track featuring AI-cloned voices of Drake and The Weeknd.
In an interview with the BBC, Ek states that there are valid applications of AI in music creation. However, he emphasizes that AI should not be used to impersonate human artists without their consent.
He anticipates that the debate over AI in music will continue for many years. Ek categorizes AI use into three “buckets”:
Tools like auto-tune that enhance music, which he finds acceptable.
Tools that mimic artists, which he opposes.
A middle ground where AI-created music is influenced by existing artists but doesn’t directly impersonate them, which remains a contentious issue.
“It is going to be tricky,” he said when asked about the challenge the industry was facing.
While Spotify doesn’t impose a complete ban on AI in all forms, the platform does prohibit the use of its content to train machine learning or AI models capable of creating music.
Increasingly, artists are expressing concerns about AI’s role in the creative industries. Irish musician Hozier, for instance, mentioned that he would contemplate taking action against the perceived threat of AI to his profession. He questioned whether the technology truly qualifies as “art.”
In the case of the song “Heart on My Sleeve,” which featured cloned versions of Drake and The Weeknd’s voices without their awareness, it was removed from Spotify and other streaming platforms in April. Its creator, Ghostwriter, later attempted to have the track nominated for a Grammy award but was unsuccessful.
“You can imagine someone uploading a song, claiming to be Madonna, even if they’re not. We’ve seen pretty much everything in the history of Spotify at this point with people trying to game our system,” Mr Ek said.
“We have a very large team that is working on exactly these types of issues.”
In May, the Financial Times revealed that Spotify had removed thousands of tracks due to the discovery of bots artificially inflating their streaming numbers.
Daniel Ek also addressed Spotify’s substantial investment in podcasts, including those featuring prominent individuals like Michelle and Barack Obama, as well as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. However, neither of these podcasts has been renewed.
The deal with Harry and Meghan reportedly amounted to $25 million (£18 million) and resulted in only 12 episodes being delivered over two and a half years. A Spotify executive recently made disparaging remarks about the work ethic of the royal couple.
“The truth of the matter is some of it has worked, some of it hasn’t,” said Mr Ek of the firm’s decision to “challenge Apple” as the market-leading podcast platform by taking on a lot of new creators.
“Five years ago Spotify was nowhere in podcasting.”
A video streaming app owned by China’s ByteDance, TikTok, has stepped up its competition with other social media giants by introducing a new feature that allows text-only posts.
This addition offers users “another way to express themselves” alongside their usual photo and video posts. Recently, TikTok entered the music streaming market, launching TikTok Music as a rival to platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.
The app now provides three posting options: photos, videos, or text. Users can also customize their text posts by adding sound, location, or Duets, which are video reactions to other users’ posts.
“These features make it so your text posts are just as dynamic and interactive as any video or photo post,” TikTok said.
According to TikTok, these new features make text posts as dynamic and interactive as any video or photo post.
In addition to music streaming and text posts, TikTok has been testing other features, including a landscape mode with select users worldwide.
In 2021, TikTok became the world’s most popular online destination, surpassing even the US search engine giant Google in terms of hits. The app boasted more than one billion active users globally that year.
As the competition between social media firms intensifies, companies like Instagram owner Meta and Elon Musk’s rebranded Twitter platform, X, have been making significant moves.
Meta’s Threads platform, for example, quickly gained over 100 million users within five days of its launch in 100 countries.
At the same time, Twitter underwent a logo change, replacing the blue bird branding with a logo featuring a white X on a black background. Additionally, Mr. Musk mentioned that the term “tweets” will be replaced with “x’s.”
Sarkodie’s controversial song ‘Try Me’, which was a response to Yvonne Nelson’s allegations in her memoir, has been removed from Apple Music and Spotify.
The song, which was released on June 28, 2023, sparked a lot of backlash from Ghanaians, who accused the rapper of ‘slut shaming’ the actress and disrespecting womanhood.
In her memoir, ‘I Am Not Yvonne Nelson’, the actress claimed that Sarkodie impregnated her in 2010 and denied responsibility. She also revealed how he took her to a clinic for an abortion and left her there to bleed.
Sarkodie, however, denied Yvonne’s claims and accused her of lying. He said it was her choice to abort the baby and that she was playing the victim card because the world listens to women more than men.
The song also called out Yvonne for being promiscuous and having multiple partners.
The song has since been taken down from Apple Music and Spotify, following complaints from some gender activists and online users.
One of them, Esther Tawiah, urged the Musicians Union of Ghana (MUSIGA) to ban the song and make Sarkodie a scapegoat for denigrating womanhood.
She said the song’s lyrics belittled the abortion pains of Yvonne Nelson and showed no empathy for her situation.
She made these remarks on GHOne TV, where she was interviewed by Natalie Fort.
According to gender activist Esther Tawiah, MUSIGA should impose a ban on Sarkodie's song "Try me." She argues that Sarkodie's actions were disrespectful and suggests using him as a scapegoat to deter other “irresponsible” men. pic.twitter.com/GuukNYDAaW
One twitter user @ShadrackAmonooC, who joined several users in discussing the latest development, alleged that the song was removed from the streaming platforms because the beat used was sampled without authorisation by the music producer MOG.
A claim that was reinforced by user @flexkgermain.
Many people have also expressed their displeasure with Sarkodie’s song on social media and called for an apology from him.
Yvonne Nelson has not yet responded to this new development concerning Sarkodie’s Try Me.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, have ended their podcast deal with Spotify.
In a joint statement, their company, Archewell Audio, and Spotify announced that they have mutually agreed to part ways and will not be renewing Meghan’s podcast, Archetypes, for a second season.
The podcast deal, estimated to be worth $25 million, was one of the major commercial agreements the couple secured after stepping back from their royal duties and relocating to the United States in 2020.
Prince Harry expressed his hope that the podcasts would bring forward diverse perspectives and unheard voices.
Archetypes, which ran for 12 episodes from August 2022, featured Meghan engaging in conversations with influential figures like Serena Williams and Mariah Carey, focusing on the stereotypes faced by women.
The podcast garnered recognition and won the top podcast award at the People’s Choice Award in Los Angeles in December.
While the specific reasons for the termination of the Spotify deal have not been disclosed, both parties expressed pride in the series they created together. The end of this partnership marks a change in the couple’s podcasting endeavors.
At the time, Meghan wrote: “I loved digging my hands into the process, sitting up late at night in bed, working on the writing and creative.
“And I loved digging deep into meaningful conversation with my diverse and inspiring guests, laughing and learning with them. It has been such a labour of love.”
The Wall Street Journal quoted an Archewell spokeswoman as saying Meghan was “continuing to develop more content for the Archetypes audience on another platform”.
When the agreement with Spotify was first announced, it was billed as a relationship which would produce several series – but in the end, only one materialised.
American media reports suggest the royal couple failed to meet the productivity benchmark required by Spotify, and therefore wouldn’t be receiving the full value of the contract.
Since splitting from the royal family, Harry and Meghan have looked to capitalise on their global fame in order to become financially independent.
That has included a multi-million dollar content deal with Netflix, and Harry’s huge contract with Penguin Books, which has already produced his autobiography Spare.
It follows Spotify’s announcement last week that it was cutting 200 jobs in its podcast division after a period of heavy investment in the medium, saying it was embarking on a “strategic realignment”.
According to Bloomberg News, the Swedish audio streaming giant Spotify Technology is getting ready to announce layoffs as soon as this week, adding to the industry-wide carnage that has already cost thousands of jobs at Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.
Unnamed sources familiar with the situation told Bloomberg on Monday that it is unclear how many positions at the well-known streaming service will be eliminated.
In October, Spotify, which has about 9,800 employees, let go of 38 employees from its podcast studios Gimlet Media and Parcast.
Spotify, which saw its share price plunge 66 per cent last year, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tech firms have cut thousands of jobs in the last year as slowing advertising revenues and recession fears prompt reassessments of headcounts that ballooned during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In recent weeks, Google parent Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon have let go of a combined 40,000 employees, after Meta and Twitter cut more than 18,000 staff combined late last year.
Smaller tech players such as UK-based cybersecurity firm Sophos and cryptocurrency players such as Coinbase have also announced job cuts affecting up to 20 percent of their workforce.
More than 55,000 tech employees worldwide have been laid off during 2023 so far, according to data collected by the Layoffs.fyi website.
Spotify have always been more than a streaming service, always tying the way you listen to music with a strong social element so you can explore your friends’ listening habits and pick up on new artists along the way.
With their new campaign, Day 1 Club, they’ve built a dedicated standalone site that builds on the much-loved RAP UK playlist.
By tapping into your listening history on the app, the Day 1 Club can show you your listening stats for your favourite UK rappers, rank your status as a fan, which you can show off with a personalised social share card.
Whether you’re more into K-Trap, Central Cee, Little Simz, Headie One or Aitch, the Day 1 Club will rank your listener status as one of four tiers: Active, Certified, Top Tier, or for the true stans, OG Levels.
Taylor Swifthas thanked her fans for “doing something mind blowing” as her new release broke the Spotify record for most-streamed album in a single day.
The popstar’s latest offering, Midnights, sparked a surge of interest after it went live on Friday – and caused something of a stir with a couple of sweary lyrics.
Less than 24 hours later, the music streaming giant announced that the album had amassed the most streams in a single day in the platform’s history.
Reacting to the news, Swiftwrote: “How did I get this lucky, having you guys out here doing something this mind blowing?!
“Like what even just happened?!”
It comes after Spotify users reported a huge spike in outages after the new album landed on the platform.
Swift has described the record as the story of “13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life” and “a journey through terrors and sweet dreams”.
It sees her turn away from the intimate indie songwriting of her two last albums, Folklore and Evermore, in favour of electronica, synth-pop and sometimes even hip-hop influenced beats.
Swift has once again written most of the album with Jack Antonoff, lead singer of rock band Bleachers.In a post on her Instagram to mark the album’s release, she shared a photo of herself with her collaborators, and singled out Antonoff as her “co-pilot”.
She said: “Midnights is a collage of intensity, highs and lows and ebbs and flows.
“Life can be dark, starry, cloudy, terrifying, electrifying, hot, cold, romantic or lonely. Just like Midnights.”
When FC Barcelona suits up to play Real Madrid this weekend during the El Clásico, their kits will look a bit different. To celebrate 50 billion streams on Spotify, Drake is teaming up with Barcelona to add the OVO Sound logo to their jersey.
Drake initially teased the newly branded kits on Friday morning, showing off OVO’s signature owl placed right in the center of the jersey. “This doesn’t feel real but it is,” he wrote in the caption.
“We were really excited to celebrate one of the biggest games of the year and mark Drake’s milestone as the first artist to reach 50 billion streams,” said Marc Hazan, VP of Partnerships at Spotify. “We’ve always said that we want this partnership to be a celebration of fans, players and artists on a global stage – and there’s no bigger stage than El Clásico.”
The partnership comes several months after the Spanish club unveiled a partnership with Spotify that added the streaming service’s branding to Barcelona’s stadium, making its official name Spotify Camp Nou. It will be the first time since 2006 that the stadium holds a sponsored name.
“Our alliance with Spotify goes beyond a mere commercial relationship. It is a strategic relationship through which we seek to bring together two worlds that can arouse emotion, namely music and football,” said Juli Guiu, Vice President for the marketing area of FC Barcelona. “This initiative is another example of this desire and the innovative spirit of our collaboration.”
Ayra Starr is impossible to ignore. Born in Benin Republic, the 19-year-old was raised between its beach city, Cotonou and the cultural hub of Lagos, Nigeria.
This mix of cultures inspires her global approach to music, art and life.
She’s inspired by the regal earthiness of Angelique Kidjo, Rihanna’s feisty confidence, as well as 90s fashion icons, and the edgy aesthetic of emo-pop.
Ayra describes her sound as Afrosoul, told in an intoxicating voice that evokes a Gen Z queen-in-waiting. Drawing from influences like classic Yoruba and Beninese music & artists like 2Face and Wande Coal, her music speaks for a generation of girls around the world who are finding themselves, united by angst and emojis.
Her strength comes from a close-knit family of music lovers, including her brother with whom she often writes songs. This ingrained love of art also manifests in her interests; she enjoys risque television shows and has experience as a model.
She announced herself to the world on January 22 with an eponymous 5-track EP, which produced the No.1 single, “Away” and spurred viral moments in the UK as well. But Ayra Starr’s moment will come months after releasing her debut studio album- 19 & Dangerous.
The celestial being’s 2021 was replete with multiple number 1s, unprecedented cosigns, and organic virality- all crescendoing in a MOBO awards nomination in just under a year of unveiling.
2022 has proceeded in similar style. Collaborating with multiple artists across the continent and featuring on two bestsellers with her label mates, Ayra continues on her upward trajectory.
Already, Ayra Starr is the second most nominated artist at the Headies- Africa’s premier music awards, and has a BET nomination under her belt. With a strong opening statement and millions of fans waiting for her next move, Ayra Starr is giving black girls a new voice.
They may have broken up, but Kim Kardashianthinks Pete Davidson is “a cutie.”
While she and the actor and comedian split in August after being romantically linked since October 2021, Kardashian had nothing but kind things to say about him in a recently published Interview cover story.
“He’s literally such a good person, they don’t really make them like him anymore,” she said. “I’m excited for what he has coming up.”
The criminal justice advocate and law student also shared some details about her forthcoming true crime podcast on Spotify.
“I’m obsessed,” Kardashian said of her love of true crime. “I had to stop watching ‘Dateline’ and all the shows when I was studying in law school.”
Her new podcast is titled, “The System,” she said.
“The first season is about a really crazy case where a guy got the death sentence for a triple homicide that happened in Ohio,” Kardashian explained. “There are so many twists and turns with how it was handled—or mishandled—and we take the listener along for a journey in search of the truth.”
Fresh off directing photography on the Spotify Free Forever Campaign starring Chicago rapper Vic Mensa, Atsuson Jr has dropped a new single titled “Quiet Thunder.†The song was released on July 29 and is his first single of 2022. The 25-year-old singer has been off the music scene for a year traveling across Africa and filming documentaries.
Endowed with celestial vocals, the singer details the beauty and struggle in a distance affair on heavy dance instrumental. With a deep connection to soulful music and a gift for storytelling, he tells the story of an adventurer on a quest to bring something to his people. However, his perspective and that of his loved ones would differ.
“I wrote this song to embody the emotions involved from both parties,” Atsuson Jrsaid about the song. With “Quiet Thunder,” he hopes to inspire people to love with enormous patience and go after their convictions. “Quiet Thunder†was produced by Sadi Beats Day, a student of the University of Ghana.
About Atsuson Jr.
Jeffrey “Atsuson Jr“ is a 25-year-old filmmaker and recording artist based in Accra, Ghana. As a child, he was encouraged to pursue his interests in soccer, creative writing, and music. He joined the Victory Bible church choir, where he was the only male, and began writing songs at 12.
Jeffrey started to explore rap music during his early days in high school. He started making cover songs and freestyle videos which helped him build a following and establish himself as an artist among his colleagues.
Atsuson Jr. is an alumnus of the National Film and Television Institute, where he studied as a film director and scriptwriter. He has worked with different production houses, shooting music videos for local and international acts and having his short film screened at film festivals. Jeffrey went on to direct photography on documentaries like the Facebook Year of Return, Spotify This Is, and Spotify Free Forever.
Taking influence from the likes of Drake, The Weeknd, Enya, Celine Dion, Aurora, Xxtentacion & Billie Eilish, Jeffrey makes sounds centered around feels, exploring R&B and Soul with dance and pop music. His music aims at connecting with people emotionally.
Listen to “Quiet Thunder” on all music streaming platforms.
