(Written December 2, 2022)

We are currently in the midst of everyone’s favorite time of year, the holiday season. And with the holiday season this year comes everyone’s favorite new reason to celebrate: Spotify Wrapped Day! Spotify has ingeniously devised a way to rebrand the tracking of their users preferences and tendencies into something fun and exciting for consumers and musicians alike. When Spotify tells me exactly how many minutes I’ve spent listening to Mnemophobia by Brainstory, nobody bats an eye, but when I have a conversation about how disgusting my aparment is and Amazon starts recommending me cleaning products it’s all, “Creepy! My phone is listening to me!!” Anyway. Spotify Wrapped Eve is an especially important day for musicians, as it allows them to see their statistics in full for the year, and gauge their growth. Metrics like “Hours Listened”, “Total Streams'', and “Total Listeners” give artists a chance to see if they have grown or declined throughout the year in terms of their fanbases. However, it also offers independent musicians a unique opportunity to experience something truly special and exciting; the instantaneous disappointment you feel when the numbers don’t go up, or worse, when they go down. Suddenly, the sense of accomplishment you were feeling from, say, releasing your debut album, or dropping the single you worked so hard on, is reduced to four numbers on a screen which disappear after a day. As someone who’s experienced it first hand, let me inform you, that feeling sucks. Hard.

However, as someone who felt those same feelings of disappointment after a particularly quiet Spotify Wrapped this year, I’m here to tell you that it’s not all bad; don’t get down on yourself over some stupid numbers! Don’t get me wrong, Spotify Wrapped numbers are a good judge of progress, but my point is, they don’t tell the whole story. For instance, I saw a drop of about 4,000 streams in my “Total Streams” from last year to this year, which I was initially super discouraged by. But it only took me a second to realize that one big reason for that decline was the fact that I’ve only released two singles this entire year, and last year I released a monster of an 18 track album. Spotify Wrapped doesn’t account for the amount of music you’ve released this year, and maybe this year has been one of creation for you, rather than one of release. Artists need time to create art, and not every year can have an album release; sometimes you may only get one single out, and that’s okay. What’s important is that you made music you’re proud of and passionate about, and that you did everything you could marketing-wise to get people to listen to it. That’s all you can control as an artist: your effort.

On top of that, Spotify Wrapped may show you how many listeners you had this year, but what it doesn’t tell you is how many fans you connected with. That’s a metric that can only be measured through real interaction, whether it be someone reaching out and connecting with you through a physical experience, or even through social media (and I don’t mean scammers, I mean real life people who are contacting you to say they’ve been touched by your art; or in other words, that they “fuck with your shit”). How many fans do you keep in contact with? How many people came to your live show, and how many people liked it so much that they brought their friends to all the ones after that? Did you talk to those people afterwards and thank them for their support? What does your contact list look like? Is it long and filled with the information of fans whom you can contact whenever you have a new show, or a new release, or any other special experience you want to share with them? These are the important questions you need to ask yourself as a new, independent artist trying to build a fanbase. Streams from playlists are great, but odds are most of the people who streamed you on Fresh Finds aren’t tapping into your other discography and listening to the deep cuts. The people who are, however, are the ones you need to connect and build relationships with the most.

All of this sounds a bit cliche, but it’s really important as an independent artist not to get sucked into chasing streams like everyone else in this industry, because at the end of the day, lots of streams doesn’t mean lots of fans; in fact, nowadays, lots of streams doesn’t even mean lots of money! Getting placed on a playlist and getting 10,000 plays on a single feels great, just like it feels great to get lots of likes on Instagram. But unless you can find a way to turn those streams into true fans who are committed to supporting you on your rise to success, they won’t help you in your pursuit of a musical career. So if this wasn’t a great year for you on Spotify Wrapped, don’t totally ignore that, but take it with a grain of salt. Streams and statistics aren’t everything; the most important part of this music thing is finding people who actually connect with your music, because they’ll be the ones who stick around when you finally make it where you want to be.