UK singer-songwriter and producer prodigy Labrinth has created a hallucinatory experience with his soundtrack of HBO’s new show Euphoria, and with data as our guide, we’re going to try to navigate the psychedelic experience with you.
Mission
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Date
This is your Data Dump for Friday, Oct. 11, 2019.
Take a Psych Trip Through Labrinth’s ‘Euphoria’
Besides collaborating with Sia, Diplo, and Beyonce in recent years, Timothy Lee McKenzie, better known by his stage name, Labrinth, just scored — literally and figuratively — his first TV series, HBO’s Euphoria.
According to Rolling Stone, “His soundtrack ... hums with soft electricity, perfectly complementing the journey of the main character, Rue, a teenager caught in limbo between the euphoria of a drug high and the harsh consequences of addiction.”
It’s rare that a TV show soundtrack generates high — if any at all — demand, but according to McKenzie himself, “If I put a post up, the first message is ‘Where’s the album? Where’s the soundtrack?!’ So I’m like, ‘OK, don’t worry.’ We’re working on getting ‘em what they need.”
And he and the HBO team did just that, releasing the soundtrack last Friday.
Though his early April releases of “SIN” and LSD, his Sia/Diplo collab, accounted for his highest Spotify Follower gains this year, at 5K and 3K, respectively, Euphoria has him at a 2K increase.
That said, on Insta and Wikipedia, an early single drop from the soundtrack on Aug. 3 gave Labrinth his most significant spikes with a 5K follower increase and 3.5K views, respectively.
It’s an interesting strategy for artists, labels, and managers to think about, because not only are there upfront fiscal upsides from synchronizations, but there are also the inherent promotional upsides couched in the television and video streaming industry’s massive marketing budgets.
That’s not to say that it limits a series to only one artist, of course.
Euphoria’s official Spotify playlist, which includes every track used in Season 1, ranges from Solange to Lizzo, Blood Orange to Randy Newman and much, much more.
Unfortunately, an individual curator seems to have ripped the official Euphoria playlist and pawned it off as their own, outperforming the official playlist by about 3 to 1 in terms of follower count.
Which just goes to show — albeit unscrupulously — that understanding and anticipating trends and listener behavior can go a long way toward building audiences in the streaming era.
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday, Oct. 11, 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.