That is really shocking about Mile High Club, and especially compared to King Gizzard. I really liked their collab but what I’ve heard of MHC’s other stuff didn’t do much for me, wasn’t memorable.
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Glass animals. Came across the name by chance a few months ago and neither me or any of my friends had heard of them. Somehow they are doing 35m plays a month and have a 2bn plays song
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Might be soundtrack stuff or having a song on an advert that blows a lot of these songs/artists up.
Cigarettes after sex, had a few songs in orange is the new black - it was where i first heard them.
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This is who I was going to say. Partner dropped a track into the shared likes and it was nice enough. Appaz they’re huge
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Great thread idea - it’s something that fascinates me. Twilight Sad are generally my example of a band who seem surprisingly low. Didn’t expect them to be huge, but they hovered round the 50k zone for many years, see they’re now up to 80.
I think Cigarettes After Sex are a special case where their original blow up came about because of how well their songs sat on playlists. I seem to recall them just having 8 or so loose tracks up for a long time at first, still with heaps and heaps of plays. I certainly heard about them because Spotify kept putting them in front of me, and with the name, I guess they’re very clickable.
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Record breakers!
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My (probably dumb) theory re Field Music is that they saddled themselves with a really dull band name.
I think some casual listeners are genuinely intrigued by quirky names when they spot them on a playlist (I guess Cigarettes After Sex very much fall into that category), whereas “Field Music” seems like the opposite of that - makes them sound like a worthy-but-dull ambient field recordings project or something.
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I was prepared to make a snarky comment about Cigarettes After Sex’s numbers compared to Mazzy Star but Mazzy Star get 3.8m listeners per month.
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Watched them this weekend at the Leeds festival. Having never heard a note from them I never want to hear another. This generations top loader.
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The Wombats, who did some novelty indie tunes 15 years ago, have 4.8 million monthly listeners.
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Absolutely massive in Australia. It’s weird.
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Kangaroos are mad popular over there too I think
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I prefer his obscure stuff like Jude.
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Nice
Not sure if this is exactly he remit of the thread, but I often get surprised as to what is an artist’s most popular song.
For instance, Pavement’s most popular Spotify song is Harness Your Hopes, a B-side never released on an LP, which has more than twice as many listeners as their second most popular song, Cut Your Hair.
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505 has become one of Arctic Monkeys biggest songs too, I always thought it was a bit plodding (I’m clearly in the minority).
Very good article. Thanks for that. Also interesting about that Galaxie 500 track being really popular because Spotify’s algorithm basically cued it up to play after songs it deemed sounded similar.
Don’t know much about AM, but from my digging this does seem a bit odd as it wasn’t even released as a single and has 750 million plays. Hmmm…
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Placement on Spotify playlists gives a lot of ambient artists crazy high numbers of streams. Hammock for one.
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