Cost of a 30-second Super Bowl ad

We have discovered that the amount of money corporations will spend to show you a beer commercial for thirty seconds moves in almost perfect lockstep with the number of times people listen to whoever is currently famous on Spotify, which is to say we have found a correlation so tight it makes you wonder if the universe is not so much expanding as it is increasingly redundant. The cost of that ad and the streaming numbers of the number one artist have drifted together like two leaves on the same current, neither one aware of the other, both absolutely certain they are moving independently. One begins to suspect the universe is having a laugh at our expense.

Here is what actually happened, which is somewhat less cosmic: between 2015 and 2023, both the advertising industry and streaming music underwent simultaneous growth spurts, fed by the same underlying forces—rising smartphone penetration, growing digital ad spending, and the simple fact that there were more people with disposable income and internet connections than there had ever been before. Super Bowl ad costs and Spotify streams both scaled upward not because they were secretly communicating but because they were both riding the same wave of economic expansion and digital consumption that lifted nearly everything in that era. To put it in physical terms: in 2015, that thirty-second ad cost around four and a half million dollars; by 2023, it had climbed to seven million, while the year's streaming champion was being listened to roughly two billion times more than they would have been a decade earlier—both numbers growing fat on the same technological abundance.

We have, in our enthusiastic pattern-seeking way, found two things that grew together during a period of broad economic and technological expansion, which tells us almost nothing about causation and everything about how readily humans mistake simultaneity for significance. The correlation is real; the meaning remains obscure. Both numbers simply kept going up.