STREAM as you earn

Earning money as a musician is not what it used to be. As digital music is now mainstream, album sales are not as simple as selling records physically. So what does it mean to stream music and how can you make a living from it?

- KEITH BAIN

She was singing about toasted sandwiches, no jokes. The song - by Afrikaans singer-songwriter Ziané Saayman - called 'Die Braaibroodjie Reël', referencing the South African grilled cheese sandwich that's traditionally toasted over the coals at a braai. And while we love a braaibroodjie as much as the next person, we really had no desire to hear a song whose name roughly means 'the toastie rule'. It's unclear in fact if anyone really wanted to hear that song, yet at one point it had almost 60 000 views on TikTok, well over 65 000 views on YouTube, and had racked up more than 100 000 listens on Spotify. Why had this song gone viral? Why was its viewership so high?

The answer is layered: Ziané was chuckling about the fact that those views were being driven by 'haters', people who genuinely disliked the song but whose disparaging feedback was creating precisely the kind of hype her song needed to get noticed: the trick, it turns out, is not necessarily to create a great song, but to spark ceaseless online conversation, essentially tricking the algorithm into calculating that a terrible tune is actually popular and is attracting listeners' attention.

This off-the-cuff insight says plenty about the modern music industry, in which streaming platforms have become the primary means by which people access and listen to music. It is also how we discover new artists, find out what's popular, see what other people are listening to, and in the process train the platform's algorithm to make recommendations based on what it 'thinks' our personal taste is.