Inside the Hype: Spotify's New Music Friday

Breaking Down The Madness (Manager Insight)

@BRANDONVHIXON

Aug 21, 2023

This Week On The Desk

Inside the Hype: Spotify’s New Music Friday 📰
Signings ✍🏾 - Normani
Creative($) of the week 👩🏽‍🎨 - Steven Hawkins
Links 🔗 - Tracking Drake Vocals

Spotify’s New Music Friday, Breakdown The Madness For Managers

Doechii managed by TDE has the top slot on NMF

You should all know about Spotify’s New Music Friday (NMF) playlist by now. Every artist and their manager wants in, and our guy Mark Williamson, ex-Spotify bigwig (now @ ROSTR), spilled the tea after a decade inside.

Mark analyzed 12 months of Spotify’s NMF (Global), looking at the connections between management companies & the artists featured on the last 52 NMFs. Out of 1.6K management companies trying to get their artists on NMF, only about 400 got their artists on NMF more than once in a year. Translation: 75% got ZERO!

As a management company, your statistical chance of having an artist on NMF in any given week is under half a percent (0.47%). Just shy of your chances of flipping heads on a coin 7 times in a row (0.78%).

Management companies whose artists had the most appearances on NMF in the last 12 months are the big players like Red Light with 142 spots. But then there's the underdogs like Fee Banks - with just four artists but pulling a solid 35 features. And if you're in Hip-Hop, those management teams are cashing in thanks to the genre's consistent release culture. Hip-Hop companies with high hit rates across their roster include TDE & Solid Foundation.

A trend Mark’s been seeing at ROSTR over the last few years is that the biggest management companies are getting bigger (by roster size). They’re also signing more and more of the A-List talent from smaller companies. The recent World’s Leading Artist Management Companies 2023 report showed the growing gap between the top 20 or so companies & the rest of the pack in terms of roster and audience size.

The top 5% of management companies had >50% of all the slots on NMF over the last 52 weeks. It’s not quite the classic 80/20 Pareto ratio, but it’s a definitive concentration.

The top 15 companies listed here contributed 20% of all artists that appeared on NMF last 12 months. Which is kind of nuts.

Of course, having popular artists will get you on NMF more. But getting more of your artists on NMF (either by direct or by label influence) will also be one of the factors that helps you get more popular artists in the first place.

This is a massive oversimplification for brevity, and it’s of course just one of many opportunities an artist is looking for. But Williamson think’s it’s illustrative of a trend towards an emergence of “majors” in the management world. Rosters won’t be nearly as big & it won’t be as consolidated as record label or agency majors, but there will be a very clear scale gap between 10 or so companies & the rest of the management world. This is already happening, but I believe it’s going to accelerate. These “majors” will be increasingly attractive to the artists that break-out into the major leagues, as they’ll be able to deliver more consistently (alongside their partners) across a range of different opportunities (e.g. playlist promotion). This will help to entrench the cycle.

Management has always been one of the few fragmented areas of the music industry. Is that changing? However, like the “majors” all over the music industry, there’ll be artists who don’t fit, or want, that model...

Brandon