WHY WRITE A SONG?

by Nick Perloff-Giles

I was parked outside a Santa Monica Starbucks in 2015, chewing lazily on a cold brew’s plastic straw while waiting for a prescription to be filled, the day that my song went number one on Hype Machine.

I checked my phone. The reaction was immediate. I hit a Tiger Woods-style, fist-pump-to-no-one, YES, before driving back home and excitedly telling my grandmother that I was popular on a website she’d never heard of.

I’ve been a ‘professional’ musician for – depending on how you count it – about 10 years now. Maybe more, depending on how you count it (I was DJing frat parties in Arkansas in 2013, but the few hundred dollars and comp on my motel room were not covering my bills.) Despite nearly a decade of making music that ostensibly is meant to cover my groceries, I look at the musical landscape now, searching for clues about the paths to success, and I have no idea what to make of it. I’m not sure anyone else does either.

I started my career making remixes on SoundCloud. I started the ‘Wingtip’ project because my previous alias, which I will leave to you to identify, had run aground, due to multiple missteps, including a weird photoshoot around NYC’s Chinatown where I talk about my deep roots to a city I moved to for college, like, 2 years prior. Again – I’ll leave you to identify. But when I started, the path, at least for a kid making beats in their dorm room, seemed straightforward: Grab the parts to a popular song, make a remix, send it to every blogger you knew, hope and pray that they posted it and that people liked it, rinse and repeat.

It was an imperfect system, and resulted in probably about a thousand too many remixes of the Chainsmokers, but it worked. If you were talented and had a vision and a sound, you could build up a following making these little remixes and covers, getting noticed on blogs, asking people to follow you on Facebook, and hazarding an original song a year or two in. That’s what I did, at least. And it worked! A year after posting my first song, a remix of Janet Jackson, I had a manager and a slate of shows. Then came Spotify, the next iteration in path-making for musicians.

I first got put on a Spotify playlist without me realizing it for about 3 months. My manager texted me and mentioned something about it, but at the time (2015), Spotify was still sort of the weird corporate upstart. I didn’t think much about it – it felt like getting invited to a party, before realizing it’s one of those ticketed, steampunk-burlseque-or-whatever themed things that everyone is invited to and (almost) nobody attends.

A few months later, though, my manager let me know that my first original song, “Rewind,” had ended up on a Spotify playlist, and that it was doing well! I still didn’t know what this meant, but when he gleefully told me he thought maybe it would cross a million streams by the end of the year, 3 months away, I tried to sound encouraging before hanging up to get back to my desk job improving Calvin Klein placement on Amazon.

It crossed a million streams two weeks later.

Suddenly, my dinky little Gmail was getting messages from people with real-deal, paid-for domain name e-mails, with deeply personal subject lines like “Love It!” and “Boom!” It was kind of silly. But it was also real, and I realized that getting on Spotify playlists, in 2016, could literally change your life. I looked around at other musicians who had signed big deals off of similarly well-performing playlist songs, and thought, well, OK, this is the game. Let’s play.

The game, it turned out, consisted of good, old-fashioned schmoozing.

Suddenly, the world of 1,000 amateur blogs and tastemakers became about 12 people, all of whom had LinkedIns and retirement plans. I think for those not involved in it at the time, it’s hard to explain what a weird regression this was.

A single person (whom I’ll hold off on naming) was the supposed curator of the ‘New Music Friday’ playlist, which at the time was a sort of admissions test for your Spotify success – and everyone knew who they were. I heard stories about briefcases of cash being sent (and returned), people showing up at their doorstep, etc.

Playlist curators were on Instagram stories backstage with artists. Everyone knew them by name.

This couldn’t last: The internet moves too fast. Starting in 2020, TikTok took over. Suddenly, nobody had authority over virality anymore. We’d gone from bloggers to curators to an omnipresent but invisible algorithm. Briefcases of cash got rerouted from Spotify’s offices to the doorsteps of whoever seemed to have the ear of the digital masses for that second; marketing strategies involved the names of kids (and the occasional adult) and proposed dance moves or reactions.

The weirdest thing is that when we reach the present day, the picture gets fuzzier. The noise gets louder.

I’m not sure if I started over, from scratch, what path I’d follow. I feel sympathetic with kids and A&Rs alike – looking at the top 50 on Spotify or Apple Music, I’m struck by how little is from bona fide new artists (or even current ones – Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” and the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” currently occupy the 19^th and 36^th spots, respectively). I worry a bit that we’re heading into an era defined by its inversion of the internet’s tendency to democratize virality, where the only things that can rise above the noise are the absolute mega-artists with the budgets and audiences to occupy the caffeinated attention of the culture. And with AI, the proliferation of passable-but-bad music hanging around services is probably going to reach unseen volumes. There are only so many minutes to devote to listening; are we headed towards everyone getting a millisecond of the pie?

Anyway – why write a song? It’s probably not, at the most basic level, to land on a blog, or a chart, or a playlist, or a trending tab.

I think writing a song, like making any other kind of art, is an expression of hope, a wisp of a prayer into the horizon, an affirmation that your perspective matters, and can’t be found out in the world. People will be writing, even if nobody’s listening – but I hope they do. – Nick Perloff-Giles, Wingtip