Don't mention the J-word: how Spotify gifted my jazz tune two million hits

Pianist Neil Cowley’s meditative tune Grace was steadily building interest in his jazz trio’s new album release … then a digital rocket went off

By the time you read this, I will have a track on Spotify that will be somewhere in the region of 2m plays. All within eight weeks of release. Having the mixed fortune of being a “jazz artist” I have been gifted the opportunity to float above the murky waters of my genre and feast with the fat cats of streaming. So how has this miracle occurred?

On first launching Grace and its accompanying video (a solo piano piece incidentally – this is important as you’ll see later) my team and I were fairly confident that we could appeal directly to the existing fans of the band and get some encouraging streaming figures on the go. Some radio play and a few posts on social media meant that we got the track to 3,000-odd plays in the first couple of days. We were quite pleased with that. These plays would have come from the people who would most likely go on to buy the accompanying album later on, and it felt like a job well done. Or so I thought.

I defy any artist not to feel glad of the attention two million plays on Spotify brings

I can anticipate how a record industry, hungry to second-guess the consumer, could turn its beady eye to these playlists