Analysis: CMAT's songwriting techniques and 'Bertie bridges' are a creative disruption of Spotify's belligerent optimisation strategies
By Anika Babel, UCD
CMAT has taken the world by storm this summer. Her headline performances at Glastonbury and All Together Now have cemented what we have known for years: Ireland has a dazzling star in its midst. The CMAT love isn't limited to festival fields, thanks to the viral sensations of her songs Take a Sexy Picture of Me and Euro-country on TikTok and Instagram.
Besides her charismatic stage and online presence, CMAT’s songwriting goes against the grain of streaming expectations, and the implications are fascinating. Once upon a time, record sales constituted the majority of an artist’s income. Increasingly, musicians have turned to the narrow profit margins of touring to earn revenue in a financially unrewarding industry. On top of this exhilarating yet gruelling enterprise, their schedules are packed with endless promotion and press junkets in an effort to attract listeners to their music, gain radio plays and sell records, concert tickets and merchandise.
Meanwhile, subscription streaming has radically transformed the music industry, and providers like Spotify have largely been embraced by consumers. Although the likes of iTunes (now Apple Music) initially aimed to recapture some income for artists whose record sales plummeted in the digital age (remember LimeWire?), the royalties today are almost criminal.
On average, Spotify pays artists somewhere between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream. What’s less well known are the company’s 'optimisation strategies’ whereby artists only receive this dismal payment when listeners breach the initial 30-second portion of a track. Spotify’s morals are low, to say the least; the company refuses to identify artificially created music to users, with AI bands like The Velvet Sundown garnering millions of streams from unsuspecting listeners who would likely rather their money be funnelled towards genuine musicians.
More dubiously, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek led an investment of €600 million in Helsing this May, an AI military weapons company complicit in wars raging around the world. This follows Ek's investment of over €100 million in Helsing in 2020. If such funds are at his disposal, why doesn’t Ek nurture artists or invest, at the very least, in a company that isn’t complicit in slaughter?
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne, who is CMAT? Profile by Louise Duffy
The resultant effect of Spotify’s royalties' model has measurably altered how contemporary pop songs are composed. Intros are disappearing, guitar solos have long left the building, songs are shrinking and choruses are arriving sooner. All of this is in an effort to deter 'track skipping’ by hooking listeners’ attention and carrying us beyond the half-a-minute debt-inducing zone.
But CMAT is doing something different. Since her first EP Diet Baby (2020), the median entry of her choruses has stretched from 50 to 60 seconds in her debut album If My Wife New I'd Be Dead (2022), to 70 seconds in her second album Crazymad, for Me (2023). In other words, CMAT is bucking Spotify’s belligerent ‘optimisation strategies.’
Based on the four singles released ahead of new album Euro-Country, a more creative disruption to the 'spotification' of popular music can be observed. Take a Sexy Picture of Me has prompted thousands of TikTok users to upload their dance moves to the platform (including a plethora of celebrities and influencers). At the time of writing, it underscores 178.5K TikTok videos.
Notably, it’s not the chorus that’s being danced to, but the song’s second verse — dubbed as the ‘millennial macarena’ due to its relatable themes of growing pains and seeking validation under society’s male gaze. More than being a catchy and provocative verse, the viral dance routine has redirected the TikTok demographic to Spotify, where they listen beyond the first chorus of Take a Sexy Picture of Me through to its second verse (commencing at 0:47).
I did the butcher, I did the baker
I did the home and the family maker
I did school girl fantasies
Oh, I did leg things and hand stuff
And single woman banter
Now tell me, what was in it for me?
Even more unusually than a verse being the hook of a song, it is the bridge of Euro-Country (at 3:15) that has captured listeners’ imagination — and perhaps hampered the likelihood of former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern throwing his hat into the upcoming presidential election. Traditionally, and as happens here, bridges enter towards the latter portion of a song to anticipate a triumphant recapitulation of the chorus. Musically, they offer contrast to the regularity of verses and choruses. It is the children of the Celtic Tiger era who are resonating most painfully with the message of CMAT’s Euro-Country Bertie Bridge:
All the big boys, all the Berties
All the envelopes, yeah, they hurt me
I was twelve when the das started killing themselves all around me
And it was normal, building houses
That stay empty, even now, yeah
And no one says it out loud, but I know it can be better if we hound it
Many of these listeners are trapped infantilised in their childhood bedrooms or living month-to-month on Ireland’s exorbitant rental market, clawing for a quality of life (let alone a mortgage), or are priced off the island, scattered to the faraway realms of Australia and Canada.
Not only has this bridge carried listeners far beyond the 30-second threshold of Spotify’s payment ceiling, it has positioned CMAT as the voice of a generation, one championing the queer community, women, the Irish language and the struggles and concerns of her peers. In an economy where consumer attention is capital, CMAT’s songwriting techniques subtly disrupt streaming models to reap the rewards of artistic and conscientious integrity.
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Dr Anika Babel is an occasional lecturer at the UCD School of Music and Creative Futures Academy
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
