The Weeknd’s big streaming milestone; ABBA Gold’s long chart run; Ready for friends to slide into your Spotify DMs?; Apple Music Radio expands; and Radiohead’s ‘Let Down’ gets a TikTok boost.Th

0:07Steve:Hello and welcome to the Price of Music brought to you by Music Ally, the show that's fascinated by all the fun and games and finances of the music world. As explained each week by me, Steve Lamaque, and him, Stuart Dredge. If you want an easy guide to what's going on in the music biz and how it all works with one or two revealing stats along the way, then here we are every week, back this week after a late summer holiday week off, but with, amongst other things, the relentless streaming success of the weekend and their future world domination plans, a surprise hit for Radiohead, new user features on both Spotify and Bandcamp, and I can't believe I'm saying this out loud, but something about Apple Radio as well.

0:51Steve:But first, this week's big figure, now we're reversing the usual roles for this for a week. I've got a big number for you, Stuart, which is 1 ,216.

1:06Stuart:Yeah, I mean, given some of the shade that's come in my direction for small, big numbers in the past. But OK, this must be an impressive one. What is 1 ,216?

1:15Steve:1 ,216 is the number of weeks that ABBA Gold, the best of ABBA, has been in the album chart. Or if you want that figure in a more stark and manageable way, that's 23 years ABBA Gold has been on the chart. Obviously not continuously for 23 years because it came out in September 1992, I think. so unbelievably there was a time when abagold wasn't in the top 100 but in total it spent 23 years in the album chart as abagold and if you want to dig a little further into this uh i went down i went through the top 100 which they publish every week uh 11 of the albums in the top 30 have been in the chart for more than 200 weeks i see 11 of the top third of the top 30 has been there, well, in the chart at least for 200 weeks.

2:17Steve:38 of the top 100 albums this week have been in the chart for four years or more, and 10 of them, so 10 % of the top 100 this week, 10 of those albums have been in the chart for more than 500 weeks. Do you want to speculate as to what they may be? There's a lot of hits albums, I can tell you that.

2:39Stuart:okay is it like uh pink floyd queen uh queen you're right queen greatest hits you're right um who else has had greatest hits um i mean there's one or two others which you know inevitably have hung around and one but what's the oasis yes yes quite quite right so the 10

3:03Steve:are time flies from oasis then what's the story uh and definitely maybe so there's three oasis albums rumors by fleetwood mac of course uh abba gold eminem's curtain call queen's greatest hits bob marley's legend and the arctic monkeys whatever people say i am and the arctic monkeys am album both of those have been in the chart for more than 500 weeks and i don't know what the you know what this says or what we conclude that these stats signify about the era we live in and maybe I guess how much you know the impact of streaming familiar songs in recent times has to do with all this but there you go make of that what you will I mean while there is while there's a Mamma Mia stage show and the virtual ABBA experience I can't their run will never end will it they'll be there forever I was thinking maybe we should get in contact with our friend Martin Tolbert of the official charts company and and suggest that once an album gets to a thousand weeks just stop counting i mean just just just take them out of the top 100 because you don't need them we'll just take it as read that abogold is one of the top 100 selling albums of the week and then let someone else have

4:20Stuart:a go because they do penalize singles they're not penalized but they wait singles don't they so if you're mariah carey a christmas it's actually a bit harder for you to get to number one than it is for a brand new song. I didn't know that.

4:31Steve:Really?

4:31Stuart:There's a waiting, I think, if they're older or been around for a while. But yeah, but it's weird, isn't it? Because I suppose Abba Gold, what, 20 years ago, Abba Gold would be in the chart because it was selling loads of copies every single week, wouldn't it? But now it's plays. And like you say, people aren't going to suddenly, unless Bjorn from Abba does something terrible to get them cancelled, no one's going to just stop listening to Abba suddenly.

4:55Steve:No. So I can't. Yeah, I'm just going to be there forever until we do something about it. Anyway, our top three stories for this week. Let's start with this one about the weekend. So the weekend's blinding lights has become the first track, talking of streaming, the first track to reach five billion streams on Spotify. And in the same week that that happens, So reportedly now, the weekend, are they trying to raise like a billion pounds of financing off the back, using obviously the catalogue as collateral to do what with? That's the bit of the story I haven't got to.

5:37Stuart:No, well, that's the kind of fascinating bit that I'm going to basically randomly speculate about because no one knows. Right. Yeah, I mean, so this follows on quite nicely from ABBA because Blinding Lights is, I guess, one of the single examples from the recent age that's equivalent of what ABBA did for the last 30 years. So Blinding Lights came out in November 2019, I think, so nearly six years old. And it's got to five billion streams. and to give you a context of the long lasting nature in 2020 so the year after it came out it was the biggest single track in the world on the IFPI's chart and then in 2021 the next year it was the seventh biggest track in the world and in 2022 so two years after it came out it was the 14th biggest track in the world so it basically hung around for ages and it's carried on and yeah and it's like some distance ahead so on Spotify the biggest track is this some weather weekend blind lights um ed sheeran's shape of view is second with just over four and a half billion right and then third is the weekend's again with star boy which is over four billion so this one bloke has two of the three biggest songs on spotify with nine billion streams collect me it's kind of kind of insane when you think about it yeah i mean things i mean that's you could sit at home and

6:53Steve:just i mean every second the royalties are just ticking over rather that's it he doesn't have to

6:59Stuart:making new music he could just sit on his floor when he's not he's got new music coming out so almost crazy because i would be at home watching kind of match of the day reruns from 1990s you know while watching the money flowing but yeah but so this thing this is going to be making him

7:12Steve:a lot of money like this is passive income yeah but as you said there was this report the same week saying he's trying to raise a billion dollars um and and do we know what for then

7:22Stuart:we don't what so what this is from bloomberg so a fairly good source and it said he's using his share of his recording and publishing rights because he owns a part share of them um as collateral so it's one of those where he puts up that and then they'll give him a million a billion dollars and then they'll make money back from the royalties from his future there's a company called lyric capital group who are one of these financial investment firms that are interested in lyrics but yeah i mean there was nothing nothing on that he's not announced it so he hasn't talked about why he's doing it before but i mean he's he's kind of this interesting guy so obviously his real name's abel he's talked about he's retiring the weekend persona after this current album so he's obviously having a moment in his career where he's thinking i'm going to do something else um like he's not retiring from music but he's retiring that whole era that whole persona and he's already like he co-founded a label back in 2011 he's done like partnerships in e-sports and tech he's launched like he launched an entrepreneurship scheme in canada a few years ago for your sort of young entrepreneurs.

8:20Stuart:He's done philanthropy. He's made a TV show. I don't know if you saw this, The Idol last year.

8:24Steve:No, I didn't.

8:25Stuart:I think it's fair to say he kind of starred in it and it had mixed critical response, it's fair to say. I'm being very polite there. He's got a new film out that's equally. So he's kind of got his finger in a lot of pies already. And a lot of those pies could be baked up quite bigger with a billion dollars.

8:43Steve:Well, yeah, I mean, a billion dollars, what's he going to do? Run for president.

8:48Stuart:oh god i mean that'd be can he he's canadian though isn't he can't run for president president yeah um but i mean if you think about like imagine if you were starting up a new record label how much money you might have to do it and now imagine the weekend if you fancy doing you fancy doing like a creating a brand new label and signing people and going he could do lots with that money but i don't know he might he might just use it to kind of buy loads of property or he might use it to, I don't know, he might make the most amazing folly of an album. You know, people make those albums where they spend loads of money, you know, like 400 grand on a timpani solo.

9:23Stuart:It isn't quite right. He might do that, and that would be wonderful to go and watch. But, yeah, he hasn't said.

9:28Steve:We'll see. Do you want another inbox to check? Because Spotify, talking of Spotify, Spotify thinks you do, because it's reintroducing a messaging feature. I don't think, I mean, obviously, I've never really engaged in Spotify on any level apart from, you know, selecting a song and pressing play. So what was the messaging feature? Why did it disappear? Why is it coming back?

9:56Stuart:Yeah, well, this goes back to the early days of Spotify when it had this inbox and you could message people and you could send tracks to people. And, you know, it was kind of like a little, you know, a sort of a social element. And they got rid of it in 2017. And I remember the announcement, I looked it up recently when I was writing this story. And they basically said, this feature has very low engagement. Like, no one's using it. It's a lot of manpower to run it. So we're getting rid of it. And then here we are in what's this sort of eight years later. They're like, we've got a messaging again.

10:26Stuart:And it's a big, but it's only on phones. It's only in certain countries. And you have to be older than 16 to do it. And they've obviously been thinking a lot about what's the worst thing that could happen here where people could start messaging kids, which is something that's happening on other platforms. So they've been very careful, very limited. But the idea is the pitch, and you can, I'll judge your face on whether this pitch is good. It's a way to share songs, podcasts, and audio books with your friends and family. And so when you log in, it will show you people you've already connected with on Spotify.

10:57Stuart:So for example, if you're on a family plan, it will show you other family members. If you've created a playlist with someone else. And I don't know about you, I mean, like the cynic in me says, if I want to share music with people, i will ping them on whatsapp or i'll put it on a social network or i'll tell them i mean god forbid i'll talk to them i don't know if i need another way i don't know if i need i don't know if having it within spotify i'm not sure how that helps me because actually if you use spotify there's a little button under every song and album an artist to share it via whatsapp instagram all those things yeah so i don't know but how about you i mean i mean i mean you could fall out with people so

11:34Steve:very easily couldn't you because um doesn't it so if it shows does it show you what you know friends or contacts have been listening to no so they have it's very much them saying i want to

11:46Stuart:share this song with you here it is it's right okay because they used to have that too you supposed to see what everyone was listening to and then they got that's that's incredibly

11:53Steve:dangerous though isn't it you're listening to what i'm under i'm unfriending you you're the reason abba gold is still in the album chart are you okay yeah it's explicit so it's like i mean so

12:07Stuart:for people i mean i don't know maybe people do it but i feel like if you are someone who loves telling your friends to listen to this track you probably have ways to do it already and i'm not

12:17Steve:sure this offers enough to make you change does this do anything for artists would artists be able to essentially set themselves up as a friend of yours and send you music is this another way of distributing a new artist's music, for instance.

12:34Stuart:Well, this is a thing, I think, because if this catches on and there is an inbox as part of Spotify and people are using it and people are used to checking their inbox in Spotify, it could be really powerful for music marketing. It could be a place where artists say, I've got a new release out, I've got some tickets going on sale, I've got whatever's happening, and they could ping you. And I think that hasn't been talked about. I don't think that's part of the launch. And I wonder if one reason for that is you have to do this really carefully to avoid it becoming spammy or overwhelming. Like I don't want an artist I listened to once six years ago to be messaging me every day about their new single.

13:08Stuart:So there has to be some kind of checks and balances in who can use it and how. But I remember I went to this talk, it was last year, I think, by Instagram. And Instagram has this thing called broadcast channels where you can say, I like this person on Instagram. I'm signing up to their broadcast channel. And then they can send you messages saying, hi, I've got this new thing. and the guy at Instagram was saying this is a really powerful feature this is how you reach your super fans without any algorithm filtering you out if they've signed up to you they'll get your message it's like building a mailing list inside that yeah I mean Spotify could do that here it could make this inbox a place where you're the artist you genuinely love could ping you without running the kind of the gamut of the algorithm saying well I'm not going to show it to these people but that's all entirely me speculating because they haven't talked about that it's very much about people sharing songs and podcasts and stuff with each other at the moment but and the other thing is would you charge artists to use that feature because spotify does have a bunch of tools that it charges artists and labels to use and i suspect if they were going to let anyone any artist ping listeners there might be a case for them saying well you

14:16Steve:have to pay us to do that so we'll see okay uh our third story this week apple music's six radio radio stations may now possibly be reaching a few more listeners thanks to a new partnership which they signed last week.

14:34Stuart:Yeah, this is why I almost want to pick your brains about Apple Music Radio because I suspect you've got much more of the gossip than I have. But I mean, should I give the background for people who haven't listened to it?

14:44Steve:Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

14:46Stuart:I mean, it goes back a decade, doesn't it? To the early days of Apple Music, it launched with a live radio station as part of it this is one of the surprises was it was a streaming service but it had live radio and and over that sort of 10 years it's added five more so it's like there's now apple music hits there's a country one a latin american dance and chill out so it has these six stations and they're all live round the clock radio with djs and interviews and stuff and they've never really put out any figures like i went digging there was a press release about three years ago saying they had tens of millions of listeners across the whole network and that's

15:19Steve:the only figure that's came out ever since this is what has always amused people in the radio industry i think particularly when it's particularly when uh beats launched and everyone said well this is the death for radio because you know apple have so much power within the music industry that they'll get all the exclusive first plays and people will flock to it for ease of use and And for a while, for the first six months, maybe, sure enough, you know, record labels were putting, were sending a lot of their big artists and their, you know, exclusive first plays and using that all went to Apple for a while.

15:57Steve:And then I think they started to realize that maybe not as many people as expected were listening to it. and since then yeah we've never it's not like they have to um file any figures for they don't come out with the ray jars which is when you know every quarter there um there are stats for how many listeners are listening to radio stations normal you know old school radio stations doesn't apply to apple so we've never really known really and i'd sort of i mean apart from that um speculative bigger um or the figure which they've uh they want you to believe i would have thought they'd have made more of the fact that they had a lot of listeners publicly um if they actually had a lot of listeners but i'm you know that might be the cynic in me well apple keep things closed they

16:44Stuart:haven't announced a figure for apple music for a long time so but yes i think the thing i suppose the thing about it is it's always been part of apple music and so if you didn't pay for apple music you probably weren't listening to it aware of it really it's been part of that and so what's happened this week is this app called tune in i don't know if you've ever used it or seen it no it's like a it's a radio aggregator basically it collects radio streams from around the world and puts in one place so i can go on there and i can listen to uk radio stations but i can also listen to i don't know some of the big american independent college stations or i can find something from australia or you can basically go around the world and find radio broadcasting live right and it's got like 75 million users so it's kind of quite big yeah and now it will have those apple music radio stations sitting alongside those traditional radio stations so right it's kind of the first time you've had apple apple's radio sitting side by side with the kind of the