Billions and Billions... - Soapbox Jr.

Response has been great, and we’ve heard some great feedback from fans.

But I discovered something else pretty exciting today. I found a service that allows artists/managers/record labels to track lifetime streams on Spotify. You used to be able to do this inside the Spotify for Artists site which gave you more analytics than you could possibly comprehend, but for some reason, about 6 or 7 years ago, they cut it to just the last 12 months.

That meant that trying to figure out how many streams an artist and/or song had could only be tracked back to the previous 12-month period.

Pandora had this functionality until a couple of years ago when they overhauled their artist and song analytics, but before they changed everything, I was able to find out that Dad had OVER a billion streams on the Pandora platform which meant he was eligible for a Pandora Billionaire Award plaque which we surprised Mom with at 2021’s Volunteer Jam: A Musical Salute to Charlie Daniels and Doug Gray from The Marshall Tucker Band presented it to us.

I walked off stage with it in my hands and held it high over my head. For a long haired country boy/simple man who’s biggest success was in the 70s and 80s, it was pretty cool that people were still listening to Dad even in the new high-tech world of streaming services.

There was also a bittersweet milestone on July 6, 2020 when “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” reached number 1 on Apple’s iTunes all-genre downloads chart, but we were too consumed by the loss of Dad to know that happened until several days later.

But back to streaming, I got curious about where we are on Spotify, but Spotify is geared to a much younger audience, although it is still the one we check the most often because their analytics are pretty straightforward and easy to access.

One issue we noticed when we started releasing singles from the new Best of the CDB VolJam album was that Spotify doesn’t prioritize live singles in their algorithms. So while they were thriving on Apple Music, Amazon and other services, they were much slower to get bigger numbers, even with the very first live performance of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” from VolJam V. 

Getting the singles onto playlists helped get the numbers up, but it’s still a curiosity that we had tens of thousands of streams on other platforms and a couple of thousand on Spotify.

But back to the good news.

I found a service that allows you to see the lifetime streaming numbers that Spotify removed a few years ago, and it confirmed what I had suspected.

Dad and the CDB have had well over a billion streams. They are actually just barely below 1.25 billion and will probably hit that in a few days.

As exciting as that is, Spotify doesn’t give plaques for artists who reach a billion, just individual songs, so it will likely be a few years before “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” reaches a billion. There are also multiple versions of the song, so who knows if they would take all of those into consideration, but I’m guessing not.

Regardless, this all plays into our mission of keeping Dad’s legacy alive, and we are so thrilled and honored that despite being gone for over 6 years, his music and legacy is still going strong.

As I’ve said repeatedly, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Hold onto your boots!

Stream “The Best of The Charlie Daniels Band Volunteer Jam” here: https://lnk.to/CDB-VolunteerJam

“Ain’t it good to be alive and be in Tennessee!” – Charlie Daniels 1974

What do you think?

Let’s all make the day count!

Pray for our troops, our police, the Peace of Jerusalem and our nation.

God Bless America!

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