![]() ![]() So what have we learned from Calvin Harris' recipe for summer hits? By giving his songs a few months to percolate before Memorial Day, Harris allows them to become associated with feelings of anticipation for those first whiffs of warm weather. But maybe that release was all part of a diabolical plan to double chart with "Heatstroke," which came out at the end of March. This year, he got a jump on the competition with "Slide," which came out in February. "Heatstroke," "Let's Go," and "Summer" came out in March, "I Need Your Love" and "This Is What You Came For" came out in April, and "Where Have You Been" came out in May. Sure, Harris might not be the most risk-taking producer out there-but with previous smashes like "Feel So Close" and "This Is What You Came For" under his belt, there's no denying the man is a hit machine, especially when festival season rolls around.Ĭalvin Harris likes to release his best tracks a few months before the heat really starts. If any songs could claim the seasonal title this year, it's these two. To quote Grande on "Heatstroke," they compel you to "release, let go, and have a good time." Both songs-off Harris' forthcoming album Funk Wav Bounces Vol 1-combine catchy synth refrains with easy, bouncing beats. This year, the producer rolled out two singles that fit the bill for an all-purpose summer hit-" Slide" featuring Frank Ocean and Migos, and " Heatstroke" with Ariana Grande, Pharrell Williams and Young Thug. No one understands this better than post-EDM/pop producer Calvin Harris, whose music seems engineered to work in virtually any environment. So much great art comes from specificity, but making a song of the summer requires deliberate vagueness. It's an unenviable task to make a song that can be twisted to any listener's purposes. Summer is a time of new loves and late-night bacchanalia, but it can also be a time for sweaty, bedroom-bound antipathy-the brain-frying months where you feel better off alone. ![]() Where, if you’re wondering, ‘Summer’ has so far notched up 189.1m plays of its official video, and 42.7m of the separate audio version.If something is to be crowned the Song of the Summer, it must be malleable enough to fit any possible permutation of warm weather celebration possible in the radio-listening Western world. But they do back up Spotify’s scale as a streaming service in comparison with, say, YouTube. ![]() We recently reported on what looks like strong year-on-year growth for Spotify usage in various countries, based on cumulative weekly plays of its top 50 tracks – up 108% in the US, 162% in the UK, 158% in France and so on.Īgain, those are the top tracks, so they won’t settle the debate about Spotify’s value for smaller artists. The streaming royalties argument is less about globally-popular artists like Harris than it is about independent and emerging musicians, in any case: those who aren’t at the nine-digit-streams level, feel they have most to lose from a decline in sales of their work, and fret that streaming income will be even more weighted to the biggest artists. Everyone will agree that the devil is in the detail of how the payout makes its way through the system post-Spotify. Spotify’s defenders will cite it as the growing scale of the service, while its critics will cite it as continued proof that streaming pays peanuts – albeit lots of peanuts if you’re a big EDM star. The obligatory comparison with iTunes – at a 70% rightsholders’ share of $1.29 – means just over 1.5m download sales on Apple’s store would generate the same payout. Spotify’s average payouts are no secret since being published on the company’s website for artists last year: between $0.006 and $0.0084 per stream, meaning ‘Summer’ has so far generated a payout of around $1.2m for the rightsholders of the track.Ī million-dollar hit for Spotify, although the terms of his contracts will define exactly how much of that money makes its way through to Harris himself. Specifically, Harris’ track (161.5m streams by this morning) was ahead of Ariana Grande and Iggy Azalea’s ‘Problem’ (119.6m) and Magic!’s ‘Rude’ (99.7m). It noted that Calvin Harris’ track ‘Summer’ was the top song on Spotify over the last three months, with more than 160m streams. ![]() Spotify’s latest press release – a chart of the most-streamed songs this summer – sheds more light on the scale of revenues being generated by the biggest hits on the streaming service. ![]()
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