What's that? What's that wonderful aroma? It smells like someone's cooking. It's Russ. Rapper, singer, songwriter, producer. Said to be the most successful independent rapper of our modern age. The guy's Italian. Italians love to cook. We Italians have been known to throw a bit of basil on it.

No, but seriously, Russ, accomplished music artist, talented guy, successful guy. Though I will say his music is not necessarily for everybody, certainly not for me all the time. And at times his takes on various things can sometimes overshadow the music. He's been known to be a controversial figure here and there.

However, recently the man has gone on a very interesting and I think very much correct Twitter rant about the streaming industry and streaming numbers we have to talk about because he is making some very fair points that I think more music fans should be thinking of as Russ tears apart a lot of the dialog that is had around numbers in the streaming industry, starting with "monthly listeners, is essentially monthly impressions."

monthly listeners is essentially monthly impressions

it’s not “how many people listen to you and are fans”

someone coulda had a playlist on shuffle and your song came on and then they skip it. they would be counted as a monthly listener

stop using that metric to try to…

— RUSS (@russdiemon) April 30, 2025

One note I would add additionally to that, on a lot of these streaming platforms, including Spotify, the amount of monthly listeners depends upon whether or not you've had a big feature on another track too. So you could have logged a ton of new monthly listeners so long as maybe you've had a big hit song crossover with another artist. And again, that contributes to your monthly listeners, even if those people aren't actually going on your Spotify page or whatever page you have where they can hear your actual solo tracks and consume those.

And in addition to that, to this day, Spotify has not proven to the music industry that they are fully transparent with all of their numbers. Even with us knowing, you know, things like 30 seconds of a play being logged as a listen, I mean that's kind of BS.

But Russ continues saying 30 seconds is how long a song has to play for it to be counted. Meaning if you have a playlist on shuffle, when you skip a song after 30 seconds, you're technically a listener of that artist. LOL. Even though you didn't seek their music out, nor did you even keep listening to their music after 30 seconds.

30sec is how long a song has to play for it to be counted meaning if you have a playlist on shuffle and you skip a song after 30 seconds, you’re technically a listener of that artist lol even though you didn’t seek their music out nor did you even keep listening after 30 seconds

— RUSS (@russdiemon) April 30, 2025

This may be a phenomenon Russ is very much familiar with because he does make a fair amount of rap music in my opinion that is fairly palatable, very easy to listen to for a wide swath of people. I mean, that is proven in the numbers and exposure he gets on platforms like Spotify on a regular basis.

And as a result, I'm sure he has a lot of tracks that just kind of get playlisted here and there because they blend in with a lot of other popular rap songs at the moment. And that is in effect what a lot of these vibey playlists on Spotify are trying to do on a regular basis.

I recommend heavily that you read this new book from Liz Pelly, which I have talked about on this channel before. In fact, we even interviewed Liz on this channel. It sheds a lot of light on Spotify's business model, the streaming industry in general.

But I think Russ is cooking with these tweets. He posts an even better and longer one on top of that about platforms like Spotify sharing openly the amount of numbers and listeners and plays a given song gets on a regular basis and how toxic music discourse has become as a result of the consciousness of those numbers among the public.

Spotify should remove the public display of listener counts and streams

It’s a catalyst for unhealthy comparisons. It creates misleading metrics like "monthly listeners” and incentivizes people to cheat so they can inflate the perception of popularity

Hiding the numbers would…

— RUSS (@russdiemon) April 30, 2025

I will sidebar here to say that again in this Liz Pelly book she does go into a bit the ways Spotify behind the scenes tries to make its artists users kind of like focus on and just obsess over the streams and metrics that they're getting on the Spotify platform and encourage them to find ways to increase those streams and increase engagement on that front, which I'm sure already as an artist is like more pressure creatively than you would want to deal with when you're thinking about creating a new track. Then on top of that, adding on the audience being conscious of your numbers and how popular you are in regards to the amount of streams that you're getting on a given track, I'm sure makes the pressure even crazier and frankly weirder.

And look this is undeniably true. We already know that there are artists who in the past have tried to do what they can to game the numbers with certain album ticket merch packages when trying to increase their album sales in order to look like their record or their project is doing better on the Billboard charts. With Spotify having become more and more like the metric for the average music fan for how well an artist is doing, why wouldn't certain artists and certain managers and labels do whatever they could to kind of inflate the numbers on a platform like Spotify to create a certain perception?

"It’s nobody’s business how the music is performing outside of the artist and their team. We live in this weird time where everyone feels entitled to know everybody’s business because of social media. I get it tho, from Spotify perspective having the numbers public makes it a sport which in turn drives engagement etc etc" - Russ

Again, Russ is cooking here, but I wouldn't even give Spotify that much leeway there in terms of their motivations. You know, if you're a music platform, your primary concern should be trying to figure out ways to give the music to the listener efficiently and platform and curate great music so that you have great artists getting exposure, so on and so forth. You shouldn't be in the boardroom thinking, like, how can we make these artists compete with each other? That's a terrible thing to want. That's a terrible way to look at music.

In fact, one of the replies that Russ drops in the wake of the discourse that has happened around this tweet, "We don't hide athletes stats. Artists need to make better music and have better marketing." Okay, like, first off, artists are not all across the world of music in open competition with each other. And to the degree that it is happening now, it certainly shouldn't be on the front of how many monthly listeners do you have on Spotify? That's pretty fucking lame.

On top of it, I mean, I'm sorry, are we still under the impression that having the most listeners on a platform like Spotify automatically means that the music that you're making must be good? This is like second grader logic. 'Oh, it's. It's popular, so it must be great.' But yeah, Russ says in response to this, artists aren't athletes, hope this helps. And yes, that is in fact true.

And look, if you are going to have a bit of beef, some static in between two artists, like, I don't know, for example, let's say hypothetically, Kendrick Lamar and Drake, let's say they beefed or something. If they did, in fact, challenge each other in that fashion, the way such a thing should be decided should be by the metric of how great the lyricism is, how biting the commentary and, you know, insults are, that sort of thing. Who gave a more impressive performance, something like that.

If one of these hypothetical songs did actually end up going number one and winning a bunch of Grammys, I mean, sure, that would be cool, but that shouldn't be the ultimate way that we decide that one person's diss song is, in fact, the most superior of all the diss songs that had dropped.

Now, look again, Russ, I think, is making some really great points with these tweets. And you really have to sit here and take seriously what he's saying, because Russ is an example of an artist who has benefited massively from the Spotify platform and the way that it's currently gamed. So for him to come out in this way and crap on the company's business model and how they showcase the art, the platform certainly says something.

I mean, Russ doesn't really have motivation necessarily, outside of public perception to say what he's saying here, because, I mean, again, Russ makes a lot of money from Spotify. He looks really great by the metric of monthly listeners on that platform, and yet he is coming out here and pointing out that these numbers, all this stuff, it's crap, it's meaningless. What matters more to him as a music fan is not the numbers or the perception of numbers, but whether or not people are actually talking about the music.

And again, I know we're focusing on Russ a lot in this video. It's obviously a video about Russ's take, but Russ is not the only artist feeling this really weird pressure or taking issue with the culture of conversation that has been happening around Spotify numbers and the perception of which, so on and so forth.

Even Doja Cat on Twitter echoed similar sentiments with some words that I think specifically call out some of the toxic Stan communities on the platform, saying, "the amount of streams on a song isn’t indicative of the quality or effort put into it. If you disagree with this you could be having an episode and should seek love from the outside. Go for a run."

She kind of goes on a bit of a tirade past there, encouraging a lot of these music obsessives, number obsessives on the Twitter platform to just go out and get a life and enjoy themselves in some kind of context outside of the Bird app. Doja Cat being an example of an artist who has benefited greatly from the current business models in the music and the streaming industry.

But still for her, what seems to take more of a priority and what's more offensive and upsetting is that these conversations that are happening on social media around popularity of music and the superiority of certain music over other music and so on and so forth, it's happening across the line of numbers and totally inflated monthly listener statistics and it's creating a really shitty social paradigm in the music space at all levels, frankly, in mainstream music.

And I think it's skewed the perception of like what underground music is these days too. I mean, I think this is maybe a conversation for another video, but the whole perception of like what underground rappers are these days and how if you're past the 2 million monthly listener mark on Spotify, you're kind of transitioning out of the underground as an underground rapper and how the term underground rappers often like attached to rap music of a certain type and sound and trend these days, which comparatively is much more trendy and popular and industry profitable than an artist who's actually much more underground, like Billy Woods for example.

But yeah, again, I think Russ is cooking on this one and I do think Spotify should put the fucking numbers away. Not only because they create a false perception, because the, the numbers on Spotify aren't always telling the truth, but it does create a situation among young music fans where there is like this perception of numbers and that we are sort of like treating music popularity like a sport of some sort, which I don't think is good for the art form and the culture frankly.

Going to leave it there. Let me know what you think about all of this in the comments. I'm sure you will.

Anthony Fantano, Russ, cooking, forever.