If you’re an Indian independent musician, then it’s very likely that you’re aware of Radar, Spotify’s “global emerging artist programme”, which spotlights indie acts. It’s also very likely that you’ve wondered what the criteria are for an artist to be chosen for the initiative. Towards the end of last year, that’s something I started wondering too about Radar, which was launched in India in May 2020.
Around December, I began noticing that similar kinds of artists tend to get picked as Spotify India’s Radar artist of the month. Indeed, among the 13 acts that have been featured so far, 10 are singer-songwriters and just three are bands. With the exception of funk/jazz-fusion group The Revisit Project, they can all broadly be classified as pop/rock musicians. Not a single electronic or hip-hop act, the two other most popular genres/formats in Indian indie, has been part of the campaign so far. Currently, of the 75 tracks on the Radar playlist, about 60 are by singer-songwriters.
It’s not surprising that singer-songwriters dominate. Even in the US, Spotify has been called out for favouring a particular style of music, specifically “muted, mid-tempo, melancholy pop, a sound that has practically become synonymous with the platform”, the purveyors of which, more than not, are singer-songwriters.
It’s an observation Indian acts have made as well. Singer-songwriter Abhilasha Sinha, who is based in the States and was Spotify India’s Radar artist for March 2021, told me that over there “it’s mostly indie-pop-cool-new-kids who are featured”. In her home country, she might be counted among those that fit that description.
The lack of bands is somewhat expected, given that advances in technology have enabled musicians to write and record songs completely independently, as reflected in the exponential increase in the number of bedroom composer-producers and the corresponding fall in the number of groups being formed during the past couple of years. Even existing ensembles are finding it harder to stick it through. “Unfortunately, keeping a band together has become more and more difficult,” says The Revisit Project’s composer-saxophonist Abhay Sharma. “We have had seven members leave the band in the last three years.”
I reached out to Spotify to ask them how they go about deciding their Radar roster. “It’s something we don’t want to reveal because we don’t want artists to start creating music based on the criteria we give,” said Padmanabhan ‘Paddy’ Nurani, their head of artist and label partnerships. “It’s not a contest we’re running.” Paddy did however share that there are “global guidelines” that they follow when drawing up the list.
“The main criteria is that these artists can’t be on any major or big labels in India,” said Paddy. “Our intent was to recognise talent that has some social media following, consistency in making music, and with our support, is able to reach a wider audience and get noticed by labels. We’re [also] trying our best to get artists that have a global appeal, that can crossover from India.”
Of these, “consistency in making music” — or how regularly an act releases new material — has proven to be the most controversial. In July 2020, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek didn’t win any fans when he said, in an interview with UK publication Music Ally, that “artists today that are making it realise that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans” and that “the ones that aren’t doing well in streaming are predominantly people who want to release music the way it used to be released”.
He has since stated that those comments were misinterpreted but as a recent New York Times piece points out, on Spotify the more music you release, the more money you’ll make. The article elaborates that in 2020, “the number of artists that generated more than $1,000 was 184,500 — but since there are more than six million artist profiles on Spotify, that means that about 97 percent of them failed to reach that level…Spotify counters that only 472,000 artists have crossed a certain threshold of professional activity, which the company defines as having released more than 10 tracks and drawn more than 1,000 monthly listeners at some point in 2020; 5.6 million artists have never released more than 10 tracks in total.”
If 10 singles is to be taken as a milestone in an act’s career, then it would make sense that a programme like Radar focused on relatively new up-and-comers who have yet to get there. But even on this front, Spotify India has been inconsistent. For example, Radar’s artists of the month have included both Raghav Meattle, who has eight singles and an EP to his name, as well as Frizzell D’Souza, who he sort of discovered on his Instagram live series of open mic sessions and has a mere three tracks in her discography.
On the other hand, in India where independent acts rarely ever tally the millions of streams garnered by their international counterparts, perhaps an initiative like Radar is better suited to relatively established indie musicians who have already proven themselves somewhat and need that extra push to touch six-figure plays. This is something Spotify plans to rectify with the launch of Fresh Finds, a five-year-old US-based playlist that has just been introduced in 13 other markets including India. Fresh Finds focuses on “developing artists” and is described as “often the very first level of Spotify playlisting for independent artists”.
For now however, the service says they plan to stick to their early call to “keep rap out of Radar” because “hip-hop had a full ecosystem that was laid down before”. Said Paddy, “a lot of [the genre’s] younger, emerging artists [have been] placed and put on the cover of playlists such as Bambai Bantai, Dillihood, Hip Hop In India and Rap 91”. The list, he said, includes rappers and producers like Kaam Bhaari, Lit Happu, Loka, MC Stan, Prabh Deep, Sez on the Beat and YashRaj whose stream counts at least on audio-streaming services have yet to match up to those racked up by Divine and Emiway.
Similarly, Spotify India feels bands are better showcased in playlists such as Metal In India and Rock In India, and electronic and regional music acts in genre- and language-specific mixes. A significant reason for this musical segregation is something we’ve heard many a time from both radio programmers and playlist editors: those genres and languages don’t “test” well, and that doesn’t bode well for both the artists and the platform. “We’ve noticed that a pure hip-hop artist works much better [on a hip-hop playlist] than [them] getting a skip on a [genre-less] playlist,” Paddy said. “We’ve tried it. We don’t want it to be a factor where the artist is suffering.” The same thing, he added, applies to other non-“easy listening” genres and music in languages apart from English and Hindi.
This however appears to be a bit of a vicious cycle. Users who only listen to the most popular genres tend to skip these styles of music because they’re unfamiliar with them. If they’re not exposed to them more often, the likelihood of them learning to enjoy these genres reduces even further. And the chances of them bypassing this music becomes even greater. While this could be justified for playlists based purely on popularity or number of streams such as Top Hits and chart-based ones — which ironically tend to have a wider variety of genres — it kind of defeats the purpose of supposedly genre-agnostic initiatives like Radar where the idea, at least in theory, is to give a leg up to all new independent artists.
That’s a real pity because Radar has been seen to have both a quantitative and qualitative impact on an act’s career. Along with extensive playlisting, the artist of the month gets a video shoot shared on Spotify’s social media channels and is promoted through in-app banners, marketing and advertising activities they would likely otherwise only score through a label. In the first year of Radar in India, the number of streams and listeners for four of the featured artists more than doubled after being part of the programme. For two others, the amount of followers increased by over 200 percent.
Most have got playlisted abroad. Mali, for instance, appeared in five countries’ New Music Fridays, namely Australia, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Sweden, as well as the US’ Dope AF. Taba Chake got on to Mexico’s Cafe Libros., Japan’s Happy Stroll and the US’s Jasmine. Kevin Fernando was placed in a couple of Italian playlists. Some others caught the attention of rival services who put them on their playlist covers after they were highlighted in Radar. This helps bulk up not just the artist’s audience but also their bank balance as the payouts are typically higher for streams received in Western countries where there’s a larger percentage of paid subscribers compared to free users.
Moreover, campaigns such as Radar provide independent artists with a sense of validation that’s rare to come by in a business where the word indie is considered synonymous with niche or lower listenership. “Being selected for the programme was a huge boost of confidence for me,” said Mali. “The head of the department at my college saw my name on the Spotify homepage banner and wrote me an email to say he’d gone and listened to all my music.”
If we were to look solely at numbers however, then we’d find that the biggest beneficiary of Radar so far is singer-songwriter Hanita Bhambri whose streams rose by 239 percent and listeners by 294 percent. Bhambri, who had already released a five-track EP and five singles, has put out five songs since being Radar’s featured artist in September 2020. Her above-average spikes seem to prove Ek’s point that how often you deliver fresh output matters considerably on Spotify. In other words, it’s not only the kind of music you create that determines your success on the service, how much you feed the beast that is its algorithm makes a sizable difference too.
Amit Gurbaxani is a Mumbai-based journalist who has been writing about music, specifically the country's independent scene, for nearly two decades. He tweets @TheGroovebox
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