A Producer’s Formula for Spotify Success

By Aylin Aliev

When you think of a music producer, what comes into mind? 

Producers are known as the people in the background – they are needed to provide strength and foreground for the musical artist they are working with in order for them to shine through.

However, over the years, particular producers have become renowned for their skill and are pressured to produce similar music to deliver what the audience wants.

To make the music they produce as popular as possible, producers need to have the ability to pick up nuances from popular culture to give their musical prodigy the attention they deserve. Thus, music producers are integral for the industry.

How has the current streaming generation affected their job and thus, how has this affected the industry as a whole? 

Currently, streaming services are vital to keep the musical industry afloat – they have become a part of the mainstream. These services have made it possible for us to listen to music wherever and whenever through most devices, such as TVs, laptops and phones – but, we are most likely to use our phones to listen to music. 

Tailoring Music for iPhones

Mixers and engineers are now expected to mix/produce music that will sound best from an iPhone.

They have to ensure that the sound coming out of an iPhone is the highest quality because most people get their music from there.

Despite the LUFS (Loudness Unites relative to Full Scale) on Spotify being capped at level 14 - as grammy award winning producer Mark Ronson states: “Everything has to be produced so it sounds competitively as loud as possible coming out of an iPhone or as loud as possible when it comes out of a Spotify hits playlist; you have to make sure the kick drum and the guitar have the same loudness and presence all the way.” 

Therefore, a producer has no choice but to make sure everything sounds exceptionally loud- despite the volume cap in order to capture their listener’s attention to ensure they don’t skip. 

Skipping can affect an artists’ skipped to un-skip (non-complete heard) ratio. The less skips an artist has, the better their Spotify rating is, and therefore, they are more likely to be circulated and added onto playlists of other users. 

This rating is vital for an artist, because it increases the likelihood that their song will be featured in Spotify users’ playlists and the Spotify AI BaRT (Bandits for Recommendations as Treatments) algorithm.

For instance, if most users have created a playlist featuring a song with a bunch of others, then the algorithm will pick this up and make recommendations to other users to play those other songs. This will circulate the artist’s song, which almost guarantees mainstream chart success as streaming services now count for the Top 40. 

Duration of Singles

Another important factor for success as mentioned in an interview with producer Mark Ronson is that “music needs to be under three minutes and 15 seconds” because of the lowering of our attention spans. People don’t like listening to long songs – they want to be hit by the song for a short amount of time as a slow build up can cause boredom and thus it’ll be skipped. 

As a result of this, studies have investigated the difference of the length of an average song in 1998 in comparison to 2019. It was found that in 1998 the average song was four minutes and 16 seconds long whereas in 2019 it was 3 minutes and 3 seconds. 

This adds another burden onto the shoulders of a music producer. 

For an artist and music producer this can be soul destroying because of the limits streaming services can pose on them. They have to have a song of a certain length, they need to have a perfect Spotify profile, they need to have ‘loud’ songs and they need to ensure that their songs are playlist worthy. 

We no longer live in the album era – we are very much settled in the playlist era. However, to feature in playlists an artist has to follow the rules. Streaming services have created rules and conventions that act as a fool-proof formula for chart success for new upcoming artists. Therefore, music producers don’t need to add their own nuances to the music - they can no longer play with the dynamics of a song, or with recording techniques because they will be blamed for the shrinking popularity of the artist - they are confined to the unofficial rules of success created by streaming services.