Bazzi was just a kid from Michigan until success came for him.

Overnight stardom is usually a myth, but once Bazzi’s song Mine hit streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music, that’s pretty much how it went. In the pre-streaming days, it took months for a song to become a hit, and for a quirky singer-songwriter such as Bazzi, might never have happened at all. Thanks mostly to his streaming success, Bazzi’s songs have been heard more than a quarter of a billion times, and he now has a major label deal and a hit on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.

Because streaming sites rely on fan-driven metrics, “real artists have actual shots at being successful,” Bazzi says. “Back in the day, you could’ve been the most talented dude with the best songs, but if the gatekeepers didn’t like you, you weren’t going anywhere. Streaming has allowed people to come out, literally.”

Streaming services are the dominant way for fans to consume music, and industry leader Spotify began trading on the New York Stock Exchange, with an initial valuation of nearly 30 billion dollars. The success of streaming has upended lots of conventional wisdom in the music industry: the need for physical product, the dominance of superstars, the boundaries between genres, between old and new music.

What genres have benefited the most from the streaming era of music?

Streaming services are changing how we listen to music, but they’re also changing what we listen to. Thanks to streaming, sad rap is king, ’80s-style Stranger Things playlists are everywhere and Ed Sheeran is the biggest pop star in the world and not just a friend of Taylor Swift who seems like a nice guy.

Streaming reflects what people will actually listen to on their own, when provided with infinite choices that aren’t entirely constrained by what radio programmers, retailers and record company executives put in front of them.

Of course, streaming services aren’t an entirely pure reflection of audience desires. Site curators are the new music industry gatekeepers, using a combination of newfangled algorithms and old school taste to craft the playlists that help make stars. “I think we should put a lot of effort into seeing the trends that go down, and using them to put music in front of people that they would never have found,” says Nick Holmsten, Spotify’s global head of shows and editorial. “Spotify is reflective of consumers. This is not radio — we cannot force music on people.”

The streaming landscape is still very much in flux. Many listeners have yet to make the transition from physical to on-demand streaming, and upcoming advances will bring even bigger changes. The likely next phase: More sophisticated voice recognition systems (“Alexa, make me a Chainsmokers playlist”), and advanced streaming systems in cars will help nudge the last remaining consumer holdouts toward an all-digital model.

To some extent, streaming charts reflect the traditional Billboard charts, which tally both streaming numbers and physical sales. Using either metric, genres such as hip-hop are thriving, while rock is wilting. But services such as Spotify and Apple Music have otherwise upended a genre caste system that took the record industry decades to create. Thanks to streaming, old-fashioned superstars are brought back down to earth, bedroom musicians such as Bazzi are celebrities and there’s a whole new ecosystem of winners and losers.

Winner: Hip-hop

Streaming services are a beast that needs constant feeding. Younger hip-hop artists, already accustomed to providing sites such as SoundCloud with a constant stream of mixtapes and features, have adjusted to its demands more quickly than artists from other genres, and have thrived accordingly. At the heart of rap’s streaming dominance is something more ephemeral: Some songs just stream better than others, for reasons that no one can really explain yet. Hip-hop streams better than other types of mainstream music, and trap music streams better than other types of hip-hop.

Winner: Latin pop

Latin music fans, like hip-hop fans, are early digital adopters who were underserved by Top 40 radio, until the Luis Fonsi/Daddy Yankee behemoth Despacito changed everything. The first Spanish-language song to hit 1 billion listens on Spotify, it helped unleash a wave of reggaeton and Latin trap streaming hits. Last year, Latin music consumption was up 110 percent on Spotify.

Winner: Heavy metal

Back in 2015, when Spotify compiled a list of the world’s most loyal music fans, broken down by genre, metal fans were No. 1. (Blues fans were the least loyal.) Like many genres that are popular on streaming services, metal is often ignored by terrestrial radio, but its success bucks almost every other trend. Streaming services are song-based ecosystems that reward boundary-free foraging, but metal fans tend to strongly self-identify as metal fans. They listen to whole albums, spend outsize amounts of time listening online and seek out music from revered elders, gateway bands such as Metallica and Slipknot, says Bob Lugowe, director of promotions and marketing at indie metal label Relapse Records.

Loser: Rock

Indie and alternative rock is also in the doldrums. When Spotify released a list of its most popular rock bands last year, it skewed toward millennial-friendly, EDM-influenced acts like Twenty One Pilots and Imagine Dragons, shutting out bands such as Radiohead and Arcade Fire.

Loser: Pop

Pop is still one of the top streaming genres, though it consistently lags behind rap. While the rise of streaming has brought a new energy and a sense of open artistic possibilities to Latin music and hip-hop, pop seems diminished somehow, its hitmakers boxed in by the constraints of writing a song that will stream. — By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, ICON, May 27th, 2018