Side Note

Spotify’s song of the summer: a surprise to literally no one

Drake in the

Drake in the "In My Feelings" music video

Spotify has released its list of its most-streamed songs of the summer, settling once and for all what was the highly debatable 2018 Song of the Summer. And to absolutely no one’s surprise, that song is Drake’s “In My Feelings,” which became a global dance craze after it was dropped in July.

How many people streamed “In My Feelings” purely to listen to and how many streamed it over and over again while filming their own contributions to the #InMyFeelingsChallenge? We may never know. But looking at the rest of the 20-song Top Global Songs of Summer 2018 playlist, five of which are Drake songs, it’s easy to just how much the platform’s overpromotion of Drake following the release of Scorpion has succeeded in influencing its customers’ listening habits.

To wit — Spotify’s song of the summer list from last year includes artists with more than one song on the list like DJ Khaled and Justin Bieber, in collaboration with others, but no single artist dominates 20 percent of the list like Drake this year. His promotion with Spotify was notably the platform’s “first-ever global dedicated artist takeover.”

If anything, this year’s playlist is a good reminder that there are many forces that manipulate any platform’s self-reported streaming numbers. News from them about who is listening to what should be taken with a grain of salt. And besides, everyone who is anyone already knows this summer was stolen by Doja Cat’s “Bitch I’m a Cow.”