Tag: Cigarettes After Sex

bummer summer Is Spotify’s New Playlist for Gen Z Listeners To Tap Into Their Feels

August 21, 2023

Lana Del Rey’s “Summertime Sadness” stuck in your head? You’re not alone. On Spotify this summer, sad songs are getting us in our feels, thanks to our listeners who are unapologetically expressing their emotions. “Sad” is the most-searched term for Gen Z listeners on Spotify globally, and they’re tuning into our sad playlists—including pop-infused sad hour, R&B-inspired All The Feels, rap-heavy tear drop, sad sierreño, sad girl country, and sad girl starter pack—more than any other age group.  

To match the vibe in the U.S. and Canada, we launched bummer summer, the ultimate lineup of moody jams and soul-filling songs. Complete with tracks from d4vd, Frank Ocean, Phoebe Bridgers, Lana Del Rey, Big Thief, and Billie Eilish, the playlist echoes the honesty and transparency that Gen Zs emulate in their lives and listening—and harnesses the ability of emotive, lyrical music to enhance any mood.   

“There’s something really unique about this generation,” says Krista Scozzari, Spotify North American Marketing Lead. “They embrace their feelings so much. They’re really flipping the stigma of vulnerability. Gen Z has brought a raw, authentic new reality to expressing their emotions, and we’re seeing that in how they listen. We wanted to celebrate this powerful thing they’re doing.”

Gen Z listeners are seeking tracks that evoke feelings of nostalgia, wistfulness, and wanting—songs that feel like a warm embrace. “It’s important to note that not everything sounds like Billie Eilish’s ‘What Was I made For?’” says Lizzy Szabo, Spotify Senior Editor for Indie Music. “Though that was one of the breakout sad songs of the summer—probably the biggest—and was given a lot of extra context from being in the Barbie movie. It really took this feeling of nostalgia and met it with current issues and feelings.”  

Lizzy notes that subgenres like indie pop, sad rap, and sad sierreño have all boomed in the past year, with standout artists including Phoebe Bridgers (bonus points for her work with boygenius), Joji, Alex G, Haley Heynderickx, Ivan Cornejo, and Junior H. She’s also seeing a rise in catalog listening for the broody sounds of Cigarettes After Sex, TV Girl, Lana Del Rey, Mitski, and Radiohead. “Artists have a way of putting things better than we ever could, so it’s a way for people to lean in and just fully embrace their emotions and the experiences they’re going through,” she says. 

“Sad music can help us to release, express, channel, or purge our emotions,” says Dr. Michael Bonshor, PhD, music psychology expert. “It often has slower speeds, which slows down our breathing and heart rate when we listen so that we feel more relaxed and tranquil. In addition to hearing slower speeds, hearing music with sad lyrics creates a sense of personal connection with the artists who wrote them—it validates that our human experiences are shared.”

Spotify Listeners are Discovering Music from Around the World

December 18, 2019

Every day, Spotify users discover a song, artist, or genre from outside their home countries.  Whether that’s through their Discover Weekly, a friend’s recommendation, or another Spotify-curated playlist, folks are stepping outside of their comfort zones to get to know artists from a different place. These songs and artists can take listeners to another world—metaphorically. Music is a great connector that allows us to understand and experience a life or culture beyond our own.

We’ve found that over 60% of Spotify users discovered an artist from a country outside their own within the last 28 days. So just imagine what they’ve uncovered over the course of a few months, or even the year. That’s a world of travel and learning—sans passport. 

On For the Record this year, we’ve also explored artists and genres from around the world, taking note of the songs and styles that have crossed borders. Hear from some of the artists, musicians, and experts we spoke to below.

The Viral Mexican Artist Making Music Worth Crying Over

Ed Maverick, who comes from the northern state of Chihuahua, Mexico, didn’t grow up in a musical family but learned to play guitar by watching videos and playing in norteño groups—(norteño is a genre of music popular in the region he comes from)—throughout middle school. His style evolved through playing covers of songs by his favorite bands, such as those by Mexican indie rockers Little Jesus. But neither style of music suited what he wanted to do, so he decided to strike out on his own; he eventually started composing his own songs. “I felt the need to release what was going on in my mind,” he said.

Indigenous Australian Rapper Briggs Shares Message of Triumph through Music

“Shepparton has the largest indigenous population in Victoria outside of Melbourne. It also has the largest indigenous population in Victoria per capita. So there was always a presence, and it was always just a part of us and what we did and still do. We just operated as artists and rappers. You don’t really realize how different you are until it’s presented to you.” – Briggs

Santiago, Chile: Spotify’s Streaming Capital of Reggaetón

“What we are seeing with reggaetón in Chile is a great testimony to the absolute powerhouse that is Latin America when it comes to building and delivering audiences for Latin artists,” said Mia Nygren, Managing Director for Spotify in Latin America.

Meet Rich Brian, the Indonesian Rapper Performing at Spotify On Stage Jakarta

“A lot of things influence my sound, from listening to traditional Indonesian music to the stuff I listened to while spending full days on the internet making videos. Living internationally definitely influenced my attitude towards everything positively. I’m very grateful for everything that I have now, and things just never get old for me—each new experience feels like a blessing.” – Rich Brian

Charting the Meteoric Rise of South Africa’s AmaPiano

“I was fortunate to see the impact of kwaito music and what it meant for the then-young democracy that South Africa was. It became the voice of local youth to push for systematic change and fight the exclusion of the marginalized. I can’t help but think that AmaPiano is doing just that so far for this generation of young South Africans, and I can’t wait to see how many more boundaries it’ll break.” – Da Kruk

How Americana Troubadour Garrett T. Capps Went Worldwide

The European market has been turned on to Capps’s quirky brand of country too. “According to my statistics on Spotify, it seems like a lot of people in the Netherlands and Spain are discovering my music through the program,” he says. “And I’m excited to keep writing and finding ways to reach audiences.” – Garrett T. Capps

Lukas Graham Becomes First Danish Artist to Hit 1 Billion Streams for a Single Song

“I’m not sure if it’s too much to call ourselves the Arctic Monkeys of Spotify. I feel like our international breakthrough came about because of Spotify—the way streams in the Nordics and Germany pushed an unknown act into the global top 50 with a song that wasn’t available outside of the Nordics and GSA. It was a trippy ride, and luckily we’ve landed on the other side without losing our minds.” – Lukas Graham

Meet Tones and I, the Australian Ex-Busker Who Achieved a Global Hit Thanks to Streaming

In the span of just a year, Toni Watson has leapfrogged from working retail to busking full time to topping the charts in almost a dozen countries—including her native Australia. That’s all thanks to “Dance Monkey,” the viral smash that was the second-ever single for the artist best known as Tones And I.

Colter Wall Honors His Western Roots on Songs of the Plains

Nobody ever needed to explain western wear to Wall, who was raised in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Canada. “It’s predominantly cattle country,” he shares. “My last full-time gig I had before I started playing music for a living was working cows with my cousin on a thousand-head cattle ranch.”

How Spotify Helped Cigarettes After Sex Amass an International Audience

Since the release of Cry, Cigarettes After Sex’s momentum has continued to snowball; the band is now closing in on 4.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify. They’re also continuing to find success in new territories. Within a month of Spotify’s February 2019 launch in India, the country leapt into Cigarettes After Sex’s top ten markets. This popularity translated offline: In May, when the band announced two late-July Mumbai shows via a local promoter’s mailing list, they drew 30,000 sign-ups within just a few hours, causing the list to shut down.

Take a listen to Spotify’s Global Top 50 for the songs rocking the international charts.

 

How Spotify Helped Cigarettes After Sex Amass an International Audience

November 25, 2019

During the release week for their second full-length album, Cry, moody indie-rockers Cigarettes After Sex appeared on more than thirty New Music Friday playlists from different regions of the world. That kind of reach is exemplary of the Brooklyn band, who have a massive fan base outside of the U.S., particularly in Eastern Europe, Latin America, South America, and Asia.

“There’s definitely a theme with Cigarettes After Sex, at every level of their business and their story, that is very much about what we’ve been calling the global footprint,” says Jeff Bell, general manager of international at the band’s label, Partisan Records. 

Much of that has to do with Cigarettes After Sex’s robust touring schedule. The band recently played in Seoul, South Korea—their third show in the city in twelve months—and have a 5,000-capacity headliner scheduled there for summer 2020. That concert came on the heels of multiple shows in South America, as well as gigs in Indonesia, Kuala Lumpur, and India; Cigarettes After Sex’s 2019-2020 Europe and U.K. tour has multiple shows sold out in advance. 

Cigarettes After Sex discovered they were developing fanbases in some of these territories thanks to Spotify streaming data. Accordingly, Partisan Records’ promotion for Cry was tailored toward these individual markets. Bell says they’re working with “upwards of forty different” marketing and promotions teams “totaling a hundred-plus territories, to make sure that we’re getting local language assets for ads on Spotify, be it audio or graphics.” Cigarettes After Sex has also had great success partnering with Spotify for fans-first concert ticket access, Bell adds.

“What Spotify has done has created access for fans in all these territories,” he says. “It’s been our job as a label to provide visibility next to that access.”

As for the band’s first EP, 2012’s I., Cigarettes After Sex frontman Greg Gonzalez says it took off the old-fashioned way. “Everybody was telling their friends about it, and that’s the way it was spreading. At that time, we weren’t doing any marketing; we were just lucky enough to have gotten noticed and get attention.” Gonzalez admits this sudden virality was jarring: “We immediately hit a wall. It’s like, ‘Okay, how do we get our music everywhere now?'”

The band decided that setting up a Spotify account would be the easiest, quickest route to achieve this goal. After Cigarettes After Sex uploaded its music on the platform, the global scope of their fanbase came into focus. “We noticed this crazy wildfire that was spreading worldwide, expanding into places that we never thought necessarily we’d be popular,” Gonzalez says. “It was so unexpected. That was the start of it—it was just like this spark that kept going and going.” When Cigarettes After Sex signed to Partisan Records, both parties decided to build on this momentum by keeping the promotion low-key and personal, preserving what Gonzalez characterizes as a “homegrown, organic” approach.

This low-key approach may have also had a hand in helping the band develop loyal fans across the platform. Although recent singles landed on two popular Spotify playlists with more than two million subscribers each—”Falling In Love” appeared on It’s a Hit and “Heavenly” surfaced on The Most Beautiful Songs in The World—Partisan Records’ global director of DSP strategy Sara Dempsey says “fan engagement” is driving the band’s streaming numbers. In fact, she shared that over thirty-three percent of Cigarettes After Sex’s listens are from from Spotify users’ own playlists and library.

“It’s a really personal relationship that they have with a lot of their fans,” Dempsey says. “A lot of their fans translate the lyrics into multiple languages and look for stories there. It’s a very personal, romantic story of falling in love and heartbreak, and lust and romance, that is really universal… .I think people might spend time alone listening to this band and feel like it’s their personal, special thing.”

Since the release of Cry, Cigarettes After Sex’s momentum has continued to snowball; the band is now closing in on 4.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify. They’re also continuing to find success in new territories. Within a month of Spotify’s February 2019 launch in India, the country leapt into Cigarettes After Sex’s top ten markets. This popularity translated offline: In May, when the band announced two late-July Mumbai shows via a local promoter’s mailing list, they drew 30,000 sign-ups within just a few hours, causing the list to shut down. “Now the next headline show [there] is looking like a 8,000-person outdoor gig next summer,” Bell says.

Listen to Cigarettes After Sex and discover why so many people are gravitating toward their moody, introspective music.