Dummy by Portugal, the Man: Official Video + Taco Bell Prelaunch Ad

 

  Anyway, as I said the other day I am very excited about this new Portugal, the Man single DUMMY because of the number of calls I had to listen to about it over the past three years.   One interesting aspect of this release is that they pre-launched it with a Taco Bell Ad- see above.  Which, this is not the first time Portugal, the Man have done this.   This tactic also mirrors the rise of the tik tok inspired "clip": a 15, 30 or minute long portion of a song that is used to generate interest BEFORE the actual release of the song.  Portugal, the Man and Atlantic kind of dipped their toes in that world with this release but for artists who have come up via the success of their social media profiles, word is that the song doesn't even get released unless the clips hit certain metrics- otherwise they just scrap the song and start over.  

  Also, here is the real video for Dummy, by Portugal, the Man:

   This is a good video- I quite like it.  It's closing in on fifty thousand views in the first twenty four hours- well, 47k plus and 24 hour mark will be in eight minutes.   Measuring the success of this song is a question that very much interests me, so  I'm going to use this post to announce my new feature, the Billions Club, an investigation of songs that have over one billion streams on Spotify.  It takes it's name from the Spotify playlist itself.   BILLIONS CLUB. 

This playlist has 372 tracks on it but far fewer artists.  The list is heavily weighted towards songs released more recently, which likely reflects the enormous growth in the Spotify user base- which Wikipedia says is up 188 million.   I think it's fair to say that the "Spotify era" dates from the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016- following the Wikipedia observation that Ed Sheeran was the first artist to pass five hundred million streams in for a single song (Thinking of You.)  Thus, all the billion stream tracks happened after that point.

  If you look at the Billions Club playlist on the desktop version the Spotify playlist show you WHEN the track was added to the playlist.  For example, Have You Ever Seen the Rain by CCR and Going Bad by Meek Mill & Drake were added in the past day.  The oldest dates for any song on that playlist are July 6th, 2021, so the playlist must have been published on that day.