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New Norwegian TV talent show to use Spotify streams to pick winners
By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 23 August 2016
A Norwegian broadcaster is launching a new talent show in partnership with the major labels and Spotify.
Titled ‘The Stream’, the show aims to mimic the success of artists like Justin Bieber, by allowing contestants to be discovered online. Though in this case, being discovered online means A&Rs being forced to watch videos uploaded to the show’s website, which isn’t quite the same as someone in the industry spotting organic buzz growing around an artist on YouTube. But whatever.
So, yes, more than 1200 hopeful contestants have uploaded videos of themselves to the website of ‘The Stream’, with the 100 highest rated (from what I can tell, ratings are based on how long anyone can bear to listen to each track) going forward to the next stage of competition. From this group, A&Rs from Warner, Sony and Universal will choose 40 artists they’d like to work with. At the end of each week, each label will sign three of the acts and release their music.
Once the music is out there, the acts’ progress will be determined by the number of streams they get on Spotify, with the least streamed artist each week deemed to be too awful to continue working with and sent back to whatever boring life they had before.
You are indeed correct, this does sound like a terrible idea for a TV show, and an even worse approach for discovering new talent, but it’s too late to stop it now. And I’m sure it’ll be on prime time BBC One just as soon as Gary Barlow’s terrible new talent show is out of the way.
If you like, you can watch some of the crappy audition videos on the show’s website. Seriously, the number one act as I write this is fucking dreadful. Be warned though, it’s quite addictive. I just got through 40 videos before I realised what was going on. One of them was pretty good.
