Never doubt the sharpness of Anne-Marie’s marketing mind

Anne-Marie’s new one is very clever because it’s called Birthday and if you consider that Spotify has 271m active users, that means 742,000 users will today be cel­eb­rat­ing their birthday and will each surely play the song twice, because people do strange things on their birthdays. And then of course tomorrow a whole new set of users will celebrate a birthday.

With this in mind Anne-Marie is on course for 10.4m streams by the end of the week and nearly half a billion streams within a year — and that’s just on Spotify. (This number would be higher were it not for the strange situation of October 17 being the day nobody on the planet has a birthday — a phe­nomenon the world’s top sci­ent­ists and stat­ist­i­cians have described as “a rum old state of affairs”. That said, the shortfall is slightly offset by people like The Queen having two birthdays.)

Other artists have released birthday-related songs in the past but Anne-Marie is one of the first streaming-native acts to do it so effect­ively 1 and with any luck Anne-Marie will reap huge rewards for this brave and innov­at­ive artistic endeavour.