Will Kanye West's new music get support from streaming services?

Around midnight Wednesday, a new song appeared on RapCaviar, Spotify's top hip-hop playlist: “All Falls Down,” Kanye West's second hit single, released nearly 20 years ago. While RapCaviar focuses primarily on new releases, it does occasionally feature twists. Still, the addition was notable because a new release from West and Ty Dolla $ign is expected to arrive at midnight tonight, and music industry executives are wondering how the streaming service's gatekeepers will react.

Will they support the famous artist who now goes by Ye, despite his previous string of anti-Semitic comments causing most of his prominent business partners to cut ties from 2022? Or will they just ignore the new album all together?

“It's going to be complicated,” says a former Spotify employee who spoke on condition of anonymity. “There will be a difference of opinion in these parts about how to handle it. Some people in leadership positions will want to be tough on Kanye for the nasty anti-Semitic things he's said. There's also going to be another side, the hip-hop groups, that's going to be like, 'No, it's Kanye, people say crazy shit all the time, plus he apologized. We do not care. We put on a playlist because it's Kanye.”

A digital marketer who helps artists with streaming strategy was more skeptical. “Streaming services did not support 'Vultures'” [Ye’s previous song], so I'd be very shocked” if they support the rest of the album, he says. “Even though Ye apologized, I felt like this came and went so quickly.”

Representatives for Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music did not respond to a request for comment.

Streaming services for the most part avoid trying to get into ethical debates about the character of artists. An exception came when Spotify announced a new policy in 2018, writing on its blog that “in some cases, when an artist or creator does something that is particularly harmful or hateful (for example, violence against children and sexual violence), we may affect the ways in which we work with or support that artist or creator.”

The backlash against this announcement was swift. Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffithsaid the CEO of Top Dawg Entertainment Advertising sign, “I don't think it's right to censor artists.” Others felt the same way, and a few weeks later, Spotify said “we are moving away from implementing an artist conduct policy.”

That said, two former employees say Spotify flexed its muscles around the playlist at least once. When Megan Thee Stallion was shot by Tory Lanez in 2020, “his songs didn't make any playlists after that,” according to a former employee. (Lanez was found guilty in court in December 2022.)

But Ye isn't tested, and he also has more than 140 Hot 100 hits to date. Many of them are still in regular rotation: its catalog has earned more than 480 million on-demand streams already this year in the US, according to Luminate.

Even so, his newest song sank like a stone. When Ye and Ty Dolla $ign released “Vultures” in November, it failed to crack the Hot 100 and has only garnered about 33 million Spotify streams, a drop by Ye's lofty standards. (He released a video for the track “Talking/Once Again” with Ty earlier this week, but it's not yet available on streaming services.)

Two sources familiar with Ye's pursuit of a distribution deal say several streaming services have signaled to them they were unlikely to support new music from the star because of widespread outrage over his anti-Semitic comments. “For an artist as big as Kanye to release a new track and not get major editorial placements is kind of extreme,” he notes. Nikki Kamberg, data journalist at Chartmetric, which tracks playlist, social media and streaming data for artists. (“Vultures” was released through Label Engine, a distribution company belongs to Create Music Groupaccording to identification information in YouTube's Content Management System.)

“Vultures” fared slightly better over the air than on streaming services. The song has received airplay from about 30 stations, according to Mediabase. Two stations in Ye's hometown of Chicago played the song the day it was released, and have played it far more than anyone else: 199 spins so far in 2024 by WGCI and 181 by WPWX. The station that played “Vultures” the third most this year, KVEG in Las Vegas, has played it 50 times.

Aside from iHeart-owned WGCI, it's notable that the stations playing “Vultures” are mostly owned by smaller radio companies, not behemoths like iHeart, Audacy and Sirius. The track has received a total of 2,144 spins, with 6.187 million audience impressions.

By the mid-2010s, radio was eclipsed by streaming services as the most important driver of listening behavior. Now something similar has happened with streaming services: Young fans are increasingly likely to discover music on short-form video platforms like TikTok. (Although they can't find Universal Music Group songs right now.) That trend, combined with streaming services' emphasis on personalization, has led executives to say Advertising sign in 2022 that “Spotify and Apple's publishing playlists don't have as much dimension” as they used to.

In an earnings call on Thursday (February 8), Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl noted that “data discovery and consumption trends” in music “are driven by the algorithms of the largest platforms and users sharing playlists with each other” — not playlists controlled by the various platforms. “The playlist guys had a lot of power four or five years ago,” says one longtime A&R. “Now their power is diminishing, because it doesn't matter what they say. Children choose at the end of the day.”

This could work to Ye's advantage. If he's able to luck into viral snaps, it won't matter much if he's put on publisher playlists in the first place. Listeners will find the music and play it, and audience response will influence streaming services.

So far, “Vultures” hasn't generated that kind of excitement. “From a fan perspective, if it went crazy and everyone was talking about it, that would push it,” says the digital marketer. “But I haven't seen it anywhere.”