Congratulations are due to independent artist Aaron Smith, whose debut track ‘Unspoken’ has (as MBW noticed on Friday) gone in with a bang at the top of Spotify and Apple Music’s flagship new-music playlists in the UK.
‘Unspoken’ was the very first track in New Music Friday UK on Spotify and Best Of The Week on Apple Music: a coup for the British singer/songwriter, who is signed to Apple’s Platoon artist-development division.
“Aaron Smith’s playlist placing could represent a concerted effort by both Apple and Spotify to ‘claim’ Britain’s next big balladic troubadour – whilst simultaneously driving up his profile,” suggested MBW, as a reflection of how some label execs are chattering about the news. Smith was also placed 26th in Spotify’s global New Music Friday playlist, and thanks to that service’s public stats, we can get an early idea of the impact.
At the time of writing, ‘Unspoken’ has been streamed 254k times on Spotify, with Smith listed as having just over 170,000 monthly listeners. Nearly 44,000 of them discovered him on the main New Music Friday playlist, while nearly 36,000 found him on the UK version of the playlist. At the time of writing, ‘Unspoken’ is not on Spotify’s UK Top 50 chart however – the minimum daily streams to make it onto there is currently just over 140k. The track isn’t currently in Apple Music’s UK Top 100 chart either, at least at the time of writing this morning.
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