Numlock Sunday: Dan Kopf on how streaming is changing music

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Dan Kopf who wrote “How music streaming and TikTok are fueling the rise of the Track 1 hit” for Quartz. Here's what I wrote about it:

So far in 2020, 48.1 percent of the songs in the Spotify top 40 U.S. hits were the first track on their album, a possible new trend in music production as record companies and artists seek to play along with the algorithmic distribution of how users of streaming services consume music. In 2017, just 40 percent of the Spotify top 40 were the first song on their album, and only since mid-2019 have the tracks in the second to fourth slots slipped from around 40 percent of the top 40 to just 26.2 percent of the top 40 in 2020. Another motivation could be TikTok, which encourages music discovery through brief dance challen…