Category: Music

Music

Analytics

Post author By Stephen Schijns
Post date November 2, 2022

For a musician with such a small audience, this is pretty meaningless, but as a stats nerd it’s kind of interesting to track the popularity of my recordings. Here are the current on line results to the end of 2024:

What I can observe is that the “niche” songs that can be marketed to a specific audience (Yukoners, surf music lovers, power pop fans, 60s retro, etc.) can generate views more easily than a general rock song like “Fooling Yourself”. Videos that pop up in “suggested” algorithms, or in response to associated searches (e.g. “Yukon Rafting”) do well. “The Bad Man” benefited immensely from a “suggested” youtube algorithm, piling up all of its views within a first week, while streaming will take longer to occur.

“What? Why?” leads in Bandcamp simply because it’s the first track on the album, and “MAP” is correspondingly in second place as the second track; listeners are giving the album a try, then fading out after a few songs. Interesting that Apple Music has pushed “MAP” and “Fully Committed” way more than the others, for some reason.

I’d note that “I’m Coming Over Tonight” had the benefit of being the first release and had a lot of friends and co-workers tuning in simply because of the novelty of me actually making a record; together with the “live band performance” video from 2018, the two versions combined would rank #2 overall.

All of the songs from #21 onwards are non-album tracks, and they will get a boost when I pull them into an album and push that. #27 and #30 are one-offs, while #31 and 32 will be released as singles in 2025.

I’d like to get more Spotify streams, because that shows an ongoing interest in the song, whereas the youtube videos tend to get watched once or twice only. Despite there being no money to be made from this (I make about $0.50 per month!), overall it’s nice to have made 20,000 musical impressions on the world!

Domestic Substitution for International Hits

Post author By Stephen Schijns
Post date October 14, 2022

For a brief period in the mid-1960s In both Canada and Australia, a sub-industry grew up of local performers covering international hit records. In some instances the local outfit was able to record and release their version before the original single made it to the domestic market. This phenomenon was closely associated with the 1964 – 1966 “beat boom” era; earlier, the domestic groups, recording industry, and radio environment were still rather primitive and could not compete with international (particularly US) product, while later in the decade the premium placed on originality pushed the “cover band” to the fringes. Furthermore, performers realized that recording an original song would create much more net revenue than sending royalties off to a foreign songwriter.

Music Radio Sixties

Canada’s International Pop Impact in the 60s

Post author By Stephen Schijns
Post date September 30, 2022

Let’s take a look at the Canadian performers who had entries on the US, UK, and Australian hit singles charts in the 1960s – click here to open the PDF – as a subset of the Canadian Hit Singles Chart (coming soon).

The Canadian music industry through much of the 1960s was simply treated as a US branch plant. The quality of the recording studios, availability of skilled musicians and technicians, and radio support were all lacking.

Music Radio Sixties

Play the Song – Backwards!

Post author By Stephen Schijns
Post date July 12, 2022

By Snjihcs Nehpets

The novelty effect of working with tape in the 1950s and 60s occasionally made it on record; tape could be sped up (e.g. The Chipmunks), slowed down, or run backwards for extra effect (e.g. The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” or Tomorrow’s “My White Bicycle”). Of course, running the tape backwards might yield an unlistenable mess of gibberish, or it could create a surprisingly melodic new tune. But rarely did a whole “backwards” song get released.