I want you to playlist me
When the definitive version of a song changes
“And this next song is called… I Want You… to Want Me!”
That’s how Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me” starts, with lead singer Robin Zander introducing the song to 12,000 screaming fans at the Nippon Budokan arena in Tokyo. He speaks slowly so that the Japanese audience can understand what he’s saying, and they clearly do, because the crowd goes nuts before he’s even finished saying the title.
That live recording of “I Want You to Want Me” is the version that introduced Cheap Trick — who were huge in Japan but had had minimal success in their home country up to that point — to America, it’s the version that was a top 10 hit in the US and several other countries, the version that sold over a million copies and became one of the biggest songs of 1979, and the version that you’ll hear on classic rock radio today. But on streaming, where most people listen to music nowadays, it is no longer the definitive version of the song.
Before “I Want You to Want Me” was a massive hit, it was a massive flop. In 1977, a different version of the song from Cheap Trick’s sophomore album, In Color, was released as a single, but it didn’t chart on the Billboard Hot 100, and its one chart appearance in the west, a peak of #97 in Canada, was nothing to write home about. That was to be expected; Cheap Trick’s early singles didn’t get much traction — at least, not in the west.
In Japan, they were a huge success, nicknamed “the American Beatles” by the Japanese press for the Beatlemania-like fan enthusiasm they inspired. When Cheap Trick toured Japan for the first time in April 1978, their Tokyo concert was released as a live album, At Budokan, intended as a Japan-only release until import copies started selling so well back home that it got an official American release in 1979, which went multi-platinum and is now in the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.
Though a couple of later Cheap Trick songs out-charted “I Want You to Want Me”, with one, “The Flame”, making it all the way to #1 in 1988, it remained their signature song, its only real competition being fan favourite “Surrender”,1 and for a long time, the live Budokan recording was the signature version of the song — and for good reason too, it’s livelier and more representative of Cheap Trick’s overall sound than the piano-driven studio version. This isn’t just a case of a popular live version of a song being a little looser and a little (or a lot) longer than the studio version, the two versions of “I Want You to Want Me” sound noticably different — which is why it really surprised me to learn that on Spotify, the In Color version of “I Want You to Want Me” has more than four times the streams that the Budokan version does.
At first glance, this is quite strange, but if you dig a little deeper, it makes sense. “I Want You to Want Me” appears on a number of official Spotify playlists, from their artist playlist This is Cheap Trick to genre playlists like 70s Rock Anthems, Rock Love Songs, Classic Rock Drive, 70s Road Trip, Summer Hits of the 70s, and Power Pop2, and on every single one of them, it’s the In Color version, not the Budokan version, that is included.3 These playlists have hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of likes, but they have an even wider reach than just users who’ve liked them, as they’re recommended at the bottom of the page when users listen to related albums and playlists. It is entirely reasonable to assume that they’re responsible for a significant portion of “I Want You to Want Me”’s Spotify plays. Not only that, but because the studio version has more plays, it shows up first in search results, and since listeners usually hit play on the first result, it gets even more plays that way.
So why did Spotify put the In Color version of “I Want You to Want Me” on all their playlists when the Budokan version was the hit? Probably because on At Budokan, the song introductions appear at the end of each track rather than at the beginning, so “I Want You to Want Me” ends with Robin Zander saying: “This next one is the first song on our new album. It just came out this week, and the song is called Surrender”, which sounds a bit weird when it’s followed by “Reelin’ in the Years” by Steely Dan, as it is on All Out 70s, or “Rock’n Me” by the Steve Miller Band, as it is on Classic Road Trip Songs.4 That made sense on CD, where someone skipping through the album’s tracklist lands at the beginning of the actual song and doesn’t lose much by missing its intro, but in the streaming era — and in the digital download era, and even in the making-mix-CDs era — it’s kind of a pain, and it’s a shame that the track breaks weren’t moved to account for that.
Funnily enough, there is actually a pretty simple solution that would allow the Budokan version of “I Want You to Want Me” to appear on these playlists. There are multiple Cheap Trick compilation albums where “I Want You to Want Me” precedes a song that is not “Surrender”, and naturally, they don’t have the “Surrender” intro at the end, but they do have Zander’s “I want you… to want me!” bit at the start. Personally, I’d go for The Essential Cheap Trick version because it has the coolest cover art, but it can also be found on Authorized Greatest Hits and Sex, America, Cheap Trick. To be fair to Spotify, they have thousands of playlists that each have dozens to hundreds of songs, so I can’t blame them for not background checking every single song to see if there’s a better version on some random other album. It’s also possible that even if the spoken intro weren’t an issue, the In Color version would have been chosen for the playlists anyway. Maybe someone thought that the live version didn’t flow as well in a playlist of other studio recordings, or they just assumed that, like most songs, the studio version was the definitive version.5
Still, it raises some interesting questions. How many other songs have had their definitive version change in the streaming era? Will radio programmers one day notice that the In Color version of “I Want You to Want Me” is more popular on streaming and start playing that one instead? How have these playlisting decisions affected At Budokan’s overall popularity? Right now, six of the album’s ten tracks have under 400,000 streams, while all ten tracks on In Color have more, with all but one exceeding 600,000 streams. How much of that is due to playlisting versus other factors?
It’s also interesting to consider what this means about people’s relationship to the music they listen to. As you can probably tell from this substack, I’m not exactly a casual listener. I think, read, and write about music a lot more than the average person, and when I recreated my entire music library on Spotify after deciding to use it as my main listening platform, I tried to find the right version of every single song, and whenever I played a song and realised I’d saved the wrong version, I’d stop what I was doing and set about finding the right one. Sometimes that was easy enough — most times, the next search result would be the right one — but sometimes I had to find the old mp3 on my laptop and compare track lengths or even play and Shazam the song to find the one I was looking for. Turns out the version of Talking Heads’ “And She Was” on the mix CD I borrowed from my friend, whose stepdad had downloaded it off LimeWire, and ripped to Windows Media Player in 2007 was not the album version but an extended remix! Who knew!
But most people aren’t obsessive nerds about music, and the story of “I Want You to Want Me” in the streaming era is a helpful reminder of that fact. I’m sure a lot of listeners, particularly younger listeners, discovered the song more recently and may not even be aware that there is a live version, but I imagine that a lot of people listening to classic rock playlists are familiar with the song, and apparently a lot of them either didn’t notice that it sounded different, or did but just let it slide. I will never know how it feels to be so chill.
“Surrender” peaked at #62 in 1978, and though it appears on At Budokan, that version never got a single release and so didn’t get the opportunity to re-chart higher the way “I Want You to Want Me” did, leading to the unusual situation where a song that never even made the top 40 is significantly more popular than Cheap Trick’s actual #1 hit.
Where they appear on the cover.
Spotify playlists can and do change, so if you’re reading some time after I published it, “I Want You to Want Me” may or may not still be on all of those playlists.
These playlists both have over 5 million likes, and “I Want You to Want Me” appears very early in the tracklists, so they’re presumably where the song gets the most plays.
There actually is a studio demo of “I Want You to Want Me” that sounds much closer to the live version than the In Color version does, but I don’t expect anyone to know that.