Would the Beatles get playlisted today?
A couple of years ago, the film ‘Yesterday’ explored an interesting if rather implausible thought experiment: in a world where, as a result of a freak event, only one person remembered the Beatles’ music, would the songs of John, Paul, George and Ringo still become as wildly popular as they did in our world? The film answered with an emphatic ‘yes’, with a little help from Ed Sheeran.
Having spent a bit of time learning about playlisting and the elements/challenges of promotion for indie musicians, I was wondering if in this imagined world, otherwise identical to ours, the sole keeper of the Beatles songbook would really find it so easy - without that chance discovery on local telly by a superstar.
The Beatles created an eclectic body of songs, especially after they moved on from their early pop. It is part of what makes them special and their many contributions to the evolution of pop music. Yet, imagine one was tasked with introducing the Beatles’ music to a world unfamiliar with it. Confronted with the genre categories on any popular streaming service, which Beatles song or two would one choose to pitch to playlisters and curators? Which mood category would one go for - music to exercise to, or to chill out and relax, for feeling sad? How would one describe songs of The Beatles if there were none of the genres their music helped give rise to? I think one would struggle with the thing that seems most important in music promotion these days - to know precisely who your audience is and to enable the algorithms to funnel your music to the right ears. Eclecticism and experimentation is bad strategy.
In literature there has been a long-standing discussion about ‘the tyranny of genre’ - the ways in which genre categories both restrict and direct (as well as classify) artistic activity. In short, it is tempting, knowing about genres, to tweak your writing to fit. It makes it easier to explain what you do, and in turn it helps others discover you. In the streaming world, these categorisations seem ever more important and consequential. I’ll bet that many artists are writing for them, more or less consciously, because it increases your chance of being heard. But, for sure, if the Beatles had been chasing genres (rather than inventing them), their music wouldn’t have been so interesting or influential.