RAPCAVIAR featuring LIL UZI VERT, PLAYBOI CARTI, DJ DRAMA, BAKA NOT NICE and others at Rebel (11 Polson), Thursday (September 28), doors 7 pm. $60-$100. ticketmaster.ca.
If there’s a single shortcut to find out what today’s hottest hip-hop songs are and what the next ones might be, it’s Spotify’s RapCaviar playlist.
RapCaviar – which boasts 7.7 million followers – has established itself as the primary launching pad for hip-hop songs with crossover aspirations. It’s credited with helping launch Rae Sremmurd’s quintuple-platinum Black Beatles and Lil Uzi Vert’s triple-platinum XO Tour Llif3 to stratospheric status.
Now it’s spread into the live realm, with a RapCaviar tour that will bring Lil Uzi Vert to Toronto, along with Playboi Carti, DJ Drama and local rapper Baka Not Nice.
The playlist is curated by Tuma Basa, Spotify’s global head of hip-hop programming, who uses intuition and experience to determine what belongs on it, in addition to a complex data analysis system called PUMA (Playlist Usage Monitoring and Analysis) that offers a bevy of information, from playlist plays to song skips, to the ages, gender and geographic location of listeners.
“What makes RapCaviar so effective is that it’s not just one person’s specific taste,” says Nathan Wiszniak, Spotify’s head of artist and label services in Canada, about the data’s impact on curation. “It evolves as the culture does.”
It also, arguably, impacts the culture, acting as much as reacting. Since 2014, Billboard has counted 1,500 streams of a song as one album sold. So getting curated into a playlist with 7.7 million subscribers doesn’t only affect discovery, but also chart performance.
Spotify doesn’t just impact hip-hop. Wiszniak cites Toronto-based singer/songwriter Jessie Reyez and Orangeville-raised EDM duo DVBBS as musicians whose organic buzz and social media followings led to prime playlist placements and subsequent increases in streams and new fans.
The undeniable boost from a spot on one of Spotify’s premium playlists has launched labels into a frenzy, wooing playlist curators with fervor typically reserved for radio programmers and DJs. In July, Billboard reported that some labels have up to five departments – radio, digital, marketing, data and sales – cajoling playlist curators to work specific artists and songs. Some people have wondered publicly whether such efforts amount to payola.
This sustained push from labels has led critics to deride how playlists create an inherent imbalance that prioritizes music from major labels over independent artists on the platform, a claim that Wiszniak is quick to refute.
“First and foremost, it’s about the song itself and the engagement that’s happening both on and off platform,” Wiszniak says. “If you look at the [Canadian rap] Northern Bars playlist that we curate, for example, it’s 95 per cent independent hip-hop.”
“At the end of the day, streaming is the most dominant thing in the music industry right now and Spotify has the most users,” says Jermane Prime, who manages Toronto-based rappers Jimmy Prime, Donnie and Jay Whiss. “The artists I work with have been on playlists and have definitely seen increases in plays, but it all depends on which playlist your song gets on.”
While the gulf between Northern Bars’ 26,000 followers and RapCaviar’s 7.7 million is vast, Wiszniak is quick to note how Spotify’s playlisting system – which routinely tests artists on smaller Spotify-curated playlists before moving fan favourites to bigger ones – can facilitate international exposure for Canadian artists.
“We’re starting to see a lot of Canadian artists get looks on international playlists,” Wiszniak says. “I’m looking at the Mellow Bars playlist curated by the Netherlands team. We’ve got Derek Wise, Belly, Jazz Cartier, Pyrex, Sean Leon, Clairmont [the Second], ShaqIsDope – all Canadian artists living on this international playlist.
“We’re working with our international territories to get these types of looks, which is helping build the audiences of these artists, many of whom are independent. We’re helping export Canadian hip-hop.”
This worldwide playlist dissemination can help artists figure out exactly where nascent fan bases are developing. A tool called “Spotify for Artists” helps analyze performance data from around the world, showing musicians which songs are connecting where, and giving them the opportunity to home in on which song types users are connecting with and course-correct on what they aren’t.
There are concerns that reducing music to data analysis can lead to a paint-by-the-numbers style of creativity solely focused on trends that guarantee playlist access. It isn’t much different from the formula labels use when trying to create hits for radio – only artists and labels can react in real-time to the data.
“There’s fluidity now [to the album rollout process] where if a song is reacting well, [artists] may be able to delay their next single,” says Wiszniak. “I think the point that we’re trying to make is that it has to be a continuous release cycle.
“People have short attention spans. If they’re not being served the content by the artist they’re engaging with… it’s really up to that artist to keep their fans engaged. If fans connect to one song, you can’t wait eight months to release an EP or album. There has to be continued engagement.”
music@nowtoronto.com | @jordanisjoso
