YouTube Music started testing a “play count” feature for popular artist songs last week. It was first noticed by some users on Reddit and will be rolled out across YouTube Music in the coming weeks. This feature tells users how many times they’ve listened to a particular track, as well as the total number of plays that song has received across the YouTube Music platform.
This follows other additions to the music streaming service, such as real-time lyrics and all-song credits. “Play Count” is the most requested feature by users, and is a new addition by YouTube Music to mirror some of Spotify’s features.
As reported by Digital Music News, the video-sharing service previously confirmed that music video views on YouTube Music were still counted as views on YouTube itself.
Tracking real listeners
While it probably wasn’t intended by Google, which owns YouTube Music, we believe this play count is very important to artists and the music industry at large. This could serve as a benchmark for determining a song’s popularity in real time, and would be a big departure from the traditional way industry players track songs.
“What we’ve seen so far is that the measure of a song’s popularity usually comes from sales,” said Bruce Bruce, senior expert in the University of New Haven’s School of Music and general manager of 88.7 WNHU. Barber explains.
The age of streaming has certainly disrupted the music industry, and not many listeners are buying music anymore. This could make streaming total views on his platform even more important for the artist.
“In the era of streaming, it didn’t matter so much whether people were actually buying physical media or buying individual tracks for download, so the charts were trying to catch up,” Barber said. added. “Actual playback of certain songs may be a more accurate indication of fan interest.”
How popular is the song?
Sales have always been considered important to music artists, but the fact remains that radio airplay has long driven that sales. Today, listeners don’t have to actually buy physical media such as vinyl records, CDs or cassettes. Alternatively, you can even purchase tracks via the aforementioned downloads. Play counts on streaming services are more important than ever.
On the radio it was almost impossible to know how many times the song was heard. Play count now gives more accurate information.
“In the past, record labels made this information largely opaque, and as a result, the numbers often didn’t match consumers’ actual record collections,” said Barber.
In this way, streaming has created even more transparency for artists.
“These new features from YouTube Music and Spotify give more information to people listening to music,” said Barber. “In the past, information was asymmetric, and labels cared about popularity just to increase sales. Now they can track how many people are listening to a song. , so to speak, can make it difficult to make a book.”
Changes in music consumption
Barber further suggested that this was just a recent dramatic shift from old ways of consuming music. This is notable in that more and more artists are releasing songs rather than albums.
“In the past, when buying music, I often stuck with whole albums, but it didn’t matter if I only wanted to listen to one song,” he added. “Now we have different ways to consume music. Whether you buy individual tracks or just stream them. To find out what this major shift in how people consume music means.” And I don’t think we know all the implications.”
It certainly doesn’t hurt to know that you’re not the only one with a track that’s stuck in your head.
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