Apparently Kate Bush scored a nr 1 hit again on online charts after the usage of her song “running up that hill” in teen serie “ stranger things”.
it gets streamed millions of time a day on spotify. In comparison heaven can wait gets about 300 000 streams a day. So the massive streaming gains for HCW I talked about in my first post are relative and actually quite small.
Anyway this shows the impact of that a beloved tv show or film can have on someone’s music. Over the years I was always puzzled why MJ’s music almost never gets used for these kind of things. It is basically the best possible promotion you can have. Does the Estate not allow it? Does it cost too much to use a song? Perhaps God forbid nobody wants to burn their fingers on using an MJ song post LN?
Heaven can wait is only a small bump in terms of streaming gains now that we can compare it to Kate Bush’ song. After checking some daily spotify charts, HCW never trended either, it never reached the daily top 100 songs. So all in all the success is only relative.
Overall MJ is nr 104 in most streamed artists of the week, up eleven places from the week before. This is purely on the strength of his old hits as there hasn’t been any promotion for MJ’s brand for years now. It’s going to be very interesting to see how luch he will gain with T40 in the coming weeks.
For what it’s worth the likes of Queen and Elton John are a lot higher, are they still harvesting because of their successful biopics a couple of years back?
Also Eminem and Linkin Park are a lot higher, I was totally not aware these 2 acts were still that popular. Are they still recording or something?
While HCW’s success is relative compared to Kate Bush’s songs hitting #1 it’s important to consider context. Stranger Things is an INSANELY popular tv show. It’s been gone for 3 years, I believe, and so it’s return is a huge deal. It’s definitely not (just) a teen show. Literally everyone I know watches it. That is a massive platform. Interestingly, I think for Season 2 they used Thriller in their trailer, but did not include it on their soundtrack (I could be wrong about that) so I imagine there may have been a bump then.
Meanwhile, HCW blew up out of absolutely no where. Literally just promotion on Tik Tok. Considering it’s not one of his well known songs and there was zero effort made on the part of the estate to make that happen, and it just happened organically, that is freaking amazing! It really speaks to the strength of his music that this can happen at all. But keep in mind TikTok is largely young people, where ST appeals to all age demographics and is obviously much more far reaching.
For what it’s worth, MJ has been in the top 100 artists on Billboard since I started regularly checking it this spring. Right now I think he’s in the 80s, but I believe he ended 2021 in the 40s. That is insane for an artist who not only has been gone for such a long time and with no promotion, but who has also been actively discredited and disparaged relentlessly by the media in very recent years. When you consider ALL he is up against, it’s remarkable that he’s still so popular!
From what I understand the estate is hard to work with for licensing and whatnot. I am sure they are getting in the way of themselves. I doubt that people aren’t using Michael’s songs because of LN, though if that’s the case, I doubt it will last. As for the other acts you mentioned, I do think the Queen and Elton John biopics made a massive impact. Also, Eminem is still pretty massive from what I can tell, but he also performed at the Super Bowl this year which has always, historically, bumped sales/charts for any artist. I am at a loss about Linkin Park lol
Anyway, that’s all of my nauseating silver lining for you
