How Do Hits Songs Convert

Conversion rates around a hit song examined.

@BRANDONVHIXON

Oct 02, 2022

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Conversion rates around a hit song 📰
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Conversion rates around a hit song examined

In 2019, Arizona Zervas dropped “Roxanne”, which remains as the single biggest release from an artist who distributed independently in recent memory. That release lead to a record deal with Columbia in November of 2019 when it was announced by Billboard that he had signed.

The bidding war for the song was notable.

Before it was added to “Todays Top Hits”, it was seeing 650,000 to 1,000,000 streams a day solely from the attention it was generating through TikTok.

To date, it has accumulated 1,295,392,910 streams.

However, what does a hit song actually deliver in terms of conversion rates from streams to followers beyond an eight figure check?

A little napkin math gives us a clear answer.

Arizona currently has 683,285 followers on Spotify. “Roxanne” generated 1,295,392,910 streams, and continues to grow.

When you do the math, that’s a 0.0527473166% conversion rate from streams to followers on his artist profile.

An artist who had a hit song, that was on the radio, that lead to a record deal with Columbia, saw less than 1% conversion rate.

This surprisingly low conversion rate from streams to followers says less about the artist, and more about the rise of content being more important than the creator. Tatiana Cirisano of Midia Research in New York makes this exact argument in a piece titled “What happens when content supersedes the creator”, which every independent team and artist should internalize.

In the piece, she advances the argument that “streaming has also contributed to passive music listening and songs becoming more important than artists. These days, it is common for a consumer to enjoy song playlists without knowing much about the underlying artists — and, in fact, 30% of global consumers say their music fandom revolves more around specific songs than specific artists”.

She’s absolutely correct, as the incentives for DSP’s rarely align with the incentives for the artist.