The People Want Music

I have some free advice to anyone trying to organize a memorable protest or a successful social movement.

I'm not keeping track of a lot of trends up close and in detail, but as an artist with an explicitly political orientation and a presence on Spotify et al, there are certain trends that are hard to ignore, even if I were trying to remain ignorant.

Although a lot of what goes on with these platforms is very opaque, there are some trends that are pretty easy to correlate.

One is that the people want music, and when people are mobilized, angry, scared, or otherwise engaged with the sort of issues artists like me write a lot of songs about, they seek out, listen to, and share music that is related to their concerns. 

Many of the various factors that drive these things are a black box with an algorithm inside, but to the best of my ability to parse the available statistics on my artist dashboard on Spotify (the biggest platform), here are the two trends that have been particularly noticeable:  my active listenership increased by around 50% during the first few months of Israel's genocidal bombing campaign in Gaza.  Over time the numbers declined, back to what they had been.  And then after Trump was inaugurated and the Trump 2.0 shit show began in earnest, the same thing happened, but more dramatically, with no sign of slowing down in the daily upward trajectory of the numbers.

There are other trends that happen that are easy to see, like the temporary increase in monthly listeners you tend to get when you release a new album or do a big concert tour, or when December rolls around, if Christmas songs happen to be your niche.  But neither of the dramatic upswings in listeners I'm talking about seem to have anything to do with those or other factors.

Before sitting down to write these words, I took a very informal poll via text message with some of the best protest singers I know in this country, to see how many protests they've been singing at lately.  I wasn't surprised to hear that the numbers have been very low, across the nation, aside from in Washington, DC.

There is a longstanding disconnect here, which I think is really crucial to highlight.  For years now, there has been so little music, especially live music, at protests, and this has been true, by my estimation, across the US, and to a lesser extent, in some other countries as well.

I haven't sung at a single protest in Portland or anywhere else since Trump's inauguration, but it's pretty clear from the numbers, and from messages I receive from random people around the US, that people who are going to those protests are listening to a lot more of my songs on Spotify lately.

These numbers on Spotify are international, and can be viewed by country, by city, by age, gender, and other filters.  So while I haven't had an invitation to play a gig in Germany for years now, since Israel's genocide began and many of my songs became illegal under German law, what is unmistakable is my listenership in Germany has surged and ebbed as the global and concurrent national crises have unfolded.

My biggest numbers of listeners are, in order, located in the US, Germany, and the UK, which together make up about two-thirds of my global audience online.  These trends happened or are happening in all three countries.  With the UK, the tour I'm working on booking is coming along more slowly than ever, but the numbers of people in that country listening to me on Spotify this month has never been higher, and the same is true for the US and Germany.

The purpose of me presenting this information to the public is not to impress anyone by my arrival in the dubiously illustrious top 3% of Spotify artists thanks to genocide in Gaza, DOGE's mass firings, the rise of the AfD, and the rise of Reform UK, but to make the correlation for anyone who is interested, and to communicate to anyone involved with organizing protests or organizing any kind of social movement response to all of what's going on, that you should clearly be having live music at your events.  

The people are hungry for it.  People are fundamentally musical creatures.  We turn to music when we're happy and we turn to music when we're angry.  We turn to music when we need hope.  The evidence is overwhelming, without looking any further than my artist dashboard on Spotify.

Whatever the reasons for not having music at protests anymore, they don't make any sense.  Let's reverse that trend, and perhaps in the process begin to reverse other trends as well, such as the trend, in all three countries and others, towards authoritarianism.