How Music Charts

By Chartmetric: Music Analytics for the New Music BusinessTechnology Music

How Music Charts episodes

May 16, 20192019-05-16 // Where the heck is Quezon City?
Highlights
It’s Excursion Thursday and we’ll be exploring the music tastes of not London, not New York, not LA….but Quezon City. Don’t know where that is? Well, pack your bags.
Mission
Good morning, it’s Jason here at Chartmetric with your 3-minute Data Dump where we upload charts, artists and playlists into your brain so you can stay up on the latest in the music data world.
Date
This is your Data Dump for Thursday May 16th 2019.
Excursion Thursday: Quezon City
We’re trying out a new segment called Excursion Thursday where we explore the music profile of a city or region and see what’s good.
And for kicks, let’s start out with a city you may frequently see in your own streaming platform data but may not be that familiar with: Quezon City in the Philippines.
If you’re not familiar with the Philippines, it’s a country in SE Asia. South of Taiwan, east of Vietnam, and north of Indonesia.
It’s really thousands of islands that also feature two official languages: Tagalog and English. This is obviously important for the Western music market and definitely a factor in why the Philippines can play a huge part in how English language artists fare in the region.
For example, American singer Khalid currently has the most Spotify monthly listeners on the entire Swedish platform at 49.6M.
While his most popular Spotify cities are LA and London at 1M monthly listeners, and Chicago, Dallas and NYC between 800K to 1M...Quezon City silently pulls up in the #6 spot with a whopping 769K monthly listeners. Not bad for a city you might have not known about.
Examples in other genres include rapper Travis Scott pulling 202K local monthly listeners and English pop rockers the 1975 featuring 126K themselves.
Now, Quezon City sits adjacent to Manila, the country’s capital, and loosely speaking, is what Orange County is to Los Angeles, or what Brooklyn is to Manhattan: a bigger, heavily populated extension of its more popular sister city.
Besides the language connection, part of what is likely driving such strong streaming activity specific to Quezon City is the fact that two of the country’s most popular universities- the University of the Philippines Diliman and Ateneo de Manila- are also located here.
Some of the top artists by YouTube video daily views show more of a regional focus: K-pop supergroup BLACKPINK currently has 496K local daily views, BTS 215K and Korea/Japan-focused girl group TWICE at 136K.
However Western artists still stand toe to toe, with Taylor Swift at 253K local daily views, Post Malone coming in at 127K and Brad Kane at 241K.
Wait what? Who’s Brad Kane, you say? Well, if you were around for the original Disney animated movie Aladdin in 1992, he was the original singing voice for main character on the soundtrack.
And how does this make sense in Quezon City? Well, if you don’t have any Filipino friends, suffice it to say that karaoke is a national pastime, and well, practicing the Disney hits are probably a part of what’s going on here.
Now when it comes to Instagram, this is a whole other world. While in the States, Instagram is the natural social media backdrop to the music industry, Western artists just aren’t that popular for Quezon City citizens.
As a matter of fact, the first Western music artist that shows up on our top followed IG artists is Hailee Steinfeld in 58th place at 62K. And before her are a legion of Filipino artists who, like Steinfeld, either bounce between the worlds of music/TV/film or make OPM.
Now if you don’t know what OPM is, that stands for Original Pilipino Music, which stands next to the country’s love for Western music, as a matter of pride in their domestic artistry.
It’s so popular that Spotify made an OPM hub that Music Ally wrote about back in February. The star playlist is called Tatak Pinoy, featuring OPM music and over 1M followers to date...check it out!
So next time you see Quezon City in your streaming data, hopefully this will put some context to it...and while you’re at it, might as well license your tunes to Filipino karaoke bars posthaste!
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Thursday May 16th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.
Free accounts are at app.chartmetric.com/signup
And article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.
Happy Thursday, see you tomorrow!
5 min
May 15, 20192019-05-15 // Who's Trending by Apple Music Playlist Adds? It's not just Taylor Swift
Highlights
It’s Winner Wednesday and we’re looking at who got added to the most Apple Music playlists in the past 30 days...and the winner is the polar opposite of Taylor Swift!
Mission
Good morning, it’s Jason here at Chartmetric with your 3-minute Data Dump where we upload charts, artists and playlists into your brain so you can stay up on the latest in the music data world.
Date
This is your Data Dump for Wednesday May 15th 2019.
Winner Wednesdays: Apple Music “Trending on Playlists”
One chart that we like to check out occasionally is the “Trending on Playlists” chart that we compile here at Chartmetric.
Trending on Playlists finds the tracks that were added to the most playlists in the past 30 days and sorts them in descending order.
So we’re essentially looking at not just what the editorial playlists are doing, but also what the 3rd party curators are including to see what the platform’s entire user base is favoring. This is useful because it’s theoretically closer to what “the people” are interested in, as opposed to just what the platform itself is trying to promote.
But in addition to that, it tends to uncover interesting mini-trends that are underway yet likely unnoticed.
Let’s check this out for Apple Music. For yesterday, May 14th, we see a few things that are totally expected.
For example, of the top 200 trending in playlists tracks, the #1 most popular genre tag is “pop” at 52 instances. Hardly surprising. Neither is the #2 genre tag, “hip-hop/rap” at 28 instances.
When we look at the top most added tracks, we find familiar faces: Taylor Swift leads in the #1 slot with “ME! (feat. Brendon Urie)”, which was released about 3 weeks ago and added to 236 Apple Music playlists since then.
Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber’s new “I Don’t Care” single was barely in 2nd place with 234 playlist adds and only released last week, and Shawn Mendes’ 2-week-old “If I Can’t Have You” comes in 3rd place with 223 playlist adds.
The #4 and #5 entries show a significant dropoff at 123 and 101 adds respectfully, which go to Kygo and Rita Ora’s single off the new Pokémon movie soundtrack and Madonna’s recent Latin collaboration with Maluma.
The rest of the top 200 are below 100 playlist adds and slope down more gently...this shows that at least for yesterday, the cumulative playlist adds are very focused on only a handful of tracks. A few spot checks earlier in 2019 show the same trend on Apple Music. So it’s good to be in the limelight….if you’re one of the chosen few.
Another neat trend is about ¾ of the top 200 trending in playlists tracks are 1 week to 1 month old, and if you include the really new releases within 1 week, you are looking at 90% of the list.
This is certainly expected as new releases would tend to be what’s added to the most playlists in the past 30 days.
But what might be surprising is that 21 of these tracks are pre-releases, which is an Apple Music exclusive feature to date: Madonna and Maluma’s track, Mark Ronson’s new release with Lykke Li and 19 other tracks haven’t been officially released with their album, because those dates are still in the future.
This goes to show that Apple is clearly using this new pre-release mechanism to great effect with some of the industry’ biggest names as something that helps Apple promote Apple, as well as artists pump up their stream counts and saves upon official album release.
Last but not least, a third cool insight about trending on playlists are some of the lesser known music that gets highlighted: for example, the label with the most playlist adds yesterday was not a major, but indie label Moon Blanket Records with 25 tracks, far ahead of the second place label with only 10.
Moon Blanket runs music for the two most added artists yesterday- Cover Kid with 15 adds and Filtered Light with 10- who respectively make relaxation music.
Cover Kid’s playlist adds include piano soundtrack renditions from popular American animated films like “Up”, “Mulan” and “Inside Out”, while Filtered Light produces religious flute-oriented instrumental tracks.
And if you think their adds don’t sound like much, Cover Kid has 518 unique track-playlist instances throughout the Apple Music ecosystem while Filtered Light has 859...which is pretty awesome for any act, let alone an indie label.
So if you’re looking for some unique playlist behavior, feel free to check out any of our Trending on Playlist charts...and in the meantime, I’m going to go learn the flute.
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday May 15th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.
Free accounts are at app.chartmetric.com/signup
And article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.
Happy Wednesday, see you tomorrow!
5 min
May 14, 20192019-05-14 // Tour Planning as If You're Carly Rae Jepsen
Highlights
It’s Technique Tuesday and you’re Carly Rae Jepsen booking a fall tour...how do you select your opening acts using data?
Mission
Good morning, it’s Jason here at Chartmetric with your 3-minute Data Dump where we upload charts, artists and playlists into your brain so you can stay up on the latest in the music data world.
Date
This is your Data Dump for Tuesday May 14th 2019.
Technique Tuesday: Advanced Artist Filtering & Opening Act Planning
You’re Carly Rae Jepsen, and you just had a super cool Rolling Stone music feature. Next up? Scheduling a tour, of course.
You’re looking for a few emerging acts to reach out to that have a similar but different sound, a partially-common audience to boost ticket sales and availability to tour in Canada later this year.
But how can we use data to do this? Well first things first, let’s take stock of how you’re doing.
I’ve got 3.3M Spotify followers. If I look at my Neighboring Artists tool, I can see that Troye Sivan has about the same amount of followers...but 3x as many monthly listeners at 22M...he’s red hot! I can’t be out-shown.
Carrie Underwood has about as many followers as me and less monthly listeners at 4.5M...but the genre-match probably isn’t so great since she’s country and I’m more disco-pop.
Hmm, let me click out to 10 neighboring artists instead of 5….click, click...ooo! Fun.! I love fun. What have they been up to lately? I’ll give them a call.
So what else can I do? How about the Advanced Filters in the Artist List tool? Sweet.
So I know I’ve got about 8.5M Spotify monthly listeners and a 75 out of 100 on the Spotify Popularity Index. Pretty nice. Let’s search some artists slightly below those stats...let’s try 4 to 6M monthly listeners. Type type type click.
333 artists returned, awesome! Who’ve we got….Desiigner at 6M listeners? Somehow, I think that could totally be cool, but who else we got?
Nina Nesbitt! Love her! Her Popularity Index is at 72, right around me! Got to call her. Ooo, Sigrid at 5.6M listeners! Love that Norwegian pop, calling her...Tyler, the Creator?! He’s at an 81 Popularity Index and 5.5M listeners...it’s a long shot, but what the heck, let’s try.
How else can we get more people to call….well, I want to have a big first tour date in Vancouver because that’s where my formative years were, so let’s check the Cities Page for there. Click, click, click.
Vancouver...alright, what have you been listening to lately?
Looks like in the past 30 days, according to recent Shazam genre tags, it’s mostly pop with 28! Nice. Ooo, and in 3rd place is Dance with 13 tags. Done, Vancouver, I’m coming back home soon.
Alright, who are some hometown heroes I can call?
Nickelback? Ehh. Felix Cartal, who’s that? 2.7M monthly listeners, impressive. Let’s click through to his profile….oooo, disco vibes? Love it. On the list.
Let’s see who else….oh Teagan and Sara?! Of course! Our fans totally crossover, how’d I not think of them. Done.
Well let’s see...that’s six awesome, relevant artists to call up that we got in a few minutes’ work. Not bad, Chartmetric, not bad!
Outro
Why thank you, Carly Rae!
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Tuesday May 14th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.
Free accounts are at app.chartmetric.com/signup
And article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.
Happy Tuesday, see you tomorrow!
4 min
May 13, 20192019-05-13 // The Bottom of Spotify's New Music Friday
Highlights
Who’s at the bottom of Spotify’s New Music Friday playlist? We’ll explore three acts who aren’t at the top of said list, but are succeeding in their own ways.
Mission
Good morning, it’s Jason here at Chartmetric with your 3-minute Data Dump where we upload charts, artists and playlists into your brain so you can stay up on the latest in the music data world.
Date
This is your Data Dump for Monday May 13th 2019.
The Bottom of Spotify’s New Music Friday
It’s New Music Friday Monday, and in keeping with tradition, the top spots of Spotify’s premier Global Release Day playlist- New Music Friday (or NMF)- go to the industry’s biggest and brightest.
Debuting to the list’s 3.2M followers, Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber take the #1 spot with the dancehall-flavored pop track “I Don’t Care”, Logic and Gucci Mane’s “Icy” takes the #2 position, and the late Avicii and crew occupy the #3 spot with the dance record “Tough Love.”
But Spotify’s NMF is 100 tracks long...so who’s at the bottom of the list and what are they up to?
Let’s take a look at three acts occupying the bottom 10%: Emotional Oranges in the 93rd, Vince Gill in the 95th and Dutch Melrose in the 100th spot.
Soulful, chill vibes duo Emotional Oranges seems to be the type of artist you’d expect to find here: a new group with a distinct, trendy sound with a growing reputation.
At 722K monthly listeners and 22K followers, this gives them a listeners to follower ratio of 32, which is great for any emerging artist.
Their amount of monthly listeners puts them in the same ballpark as Hyolyn and ZICO, two well-known Korean artists who are still growing their fan bases outside of East Asia, as well as veteran singer-songwriters Natalie Merchant and Billy Bragg.
For a new emerging act, this kind of company bodes well for Emotional Oranges, as it shows they are already getting the kind of play that current overseas stars and legacy artists with long-established followings are earning.
Vince Gill in the 95th position of the New Music Friday list is another legacy artist, but from the country world. One of the genre’s brightest stars in the 1990s, he has a room full of Country Music Awards and Grammys to show for it and surely has nothing left to prove.
But given Mother’s Day was just yesterday, Gill’s timely ballad “A Letter to My Mama” came out with quite the heartfelt sentiment which earned its placement in Spotify’s list.
Vince Gill’s 1.1M monthly listeners and 251K followers give him a smaller ratio of about 5, which makes sense given his decades-long career, which will raise his follower count on any platform due to his established public profile alone. Given that country isn’t the strongest genre on Spotify, this also lowers the available market Gill has to stream to.
Nonetheless, Gill’s monthly listener count puts him in same realm as Lin-Manuel Miranda, who’s star is super-bright but currently off-cycle in terms of recent releases, as well as Broadway star Bette Midler whose work needs little promotion to her fans who already know her work well.
Last but not least in the 100 spot on New Music Friday is LA-based producer Dutch Melrose with the electronic track “White Wine”.
Dutch Melrose has 341 followers on Spotify...not 341 thousand, but actually 341, which might be quite unexpected for any artist getting a track onto the NMF playlist.
He does have over 20K monthly listeners however, likely coming from PopFiltr’s Young and Hot playlist with 345K followers in the #2 position and over 20 other non-editorial playlists he’s placed on.
This gives him a listener to follower ratio of about 60, which is a great sign for any artist, though a little less meaningful with such a low follower count.
However, this also does indicate an opportunity for a viral fanbase, if he’s able to engage potential fans via Instagram and other platforms.
All things said, to grab any spot on Spotify’s New Music Friday as an independent artist with not even 400 followers is quite the feat!
Good luck to him, Vince Gill and Emotional Oranges as they enjoy the rest of the week on NMF.
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Monday May 13th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.
Free accounts are at app.chartmetric.com/signup
And article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.
Happy Monday, see you tomorrow!
4 min
May 10, 20192019-05-10 // Amazon Top Country 100 & the Alexa-Genre Complex
Highlights
Amazon Music’s Top 100 Country chart features a wide selection of artists, but their long time on chart suggests a wider platform trend towards stagnancy in several genres
Mission
Good morning, it’s Jason here at Chartmetric with your 3-minute Data Dump where we upload charts, artists and playlists into your brain so you can stay up on the latest in the music data world.
Date
This is your Data Dump for Friday May 10th 2019.
Amazon Music: Top 100 Songs - Country
On the Amazon Music Top Songs Country chart yesterday, Lil Nas X took the #1 spot with the Billy Ray Cyrus collaboration “Old Town Road”, spending 30 days there so far.
North Carolina’s Luke Combs took the #2 spot with the ballad “Crazy Beautiful”, only its second day on the chart, despite being released a year ago.
And the heartbroken lyrics of “Whiskey Glasses” kept its current chart peak at #3 from Tennessee’s Morgan Wallen, after living on the chart for 69 days.
The Top 100 tracks on the chart feature several artists with a handful records among them: for example, Jason Aldean, Thomas Rhett, Dan + Shay, Florida Georgia Line and Kane Brown all have four tracks charting, while Luke Combs, Maren Morris, Brett Young, Luke Byran and Chris Stapleton all have three.
Label-wise, the Top 100 also are well-distributed, with Columbia Nashville taking 10 of the tracks, Capitol Records Nashville with 9, and Warner Bros., Broken Bow and RCA Records Nashville all taking 8 tracks each.
Time on Chart & the Alexa-Genre Complex
In terms of time on chart, the Amazon Top Country 100 is fairly stagnant: 86 of the tracks have been there for at least one month, with 22 of them there for a year and a half! That’s nearly a quarter of a Top 100 chart not changing, and a sign of what I’ll playfully call for now the Alexa-Genre Complex.
For one of America’s most popular and productive genres, this is fairly bad news for any emerging country artists that are fighting to squeeze into the Alexa-driven platform, while obviously great news for the few top artists benefitting from a stagnant chart.
If we take a look at a few other Amazon genres, this chart behavior is surprisingly consistent: the Dance/Electronic genre features 87 tracks in its Top 100 that have charted for more than a month with 26 for more than 1.5 years, while 86 records in Rap & Hip Hop charted for a month plus, with 25 for more than 1.5 years.
The Pop genre also follows suit with 85 tracks for more than a month and 20 for more than 1.5 years.
It’s almost clockwork how predictable the charts are irrelevant of the genre, and likely says something about Amazon algorithmic behavior rather than each audience’s listening preferences, which would presumably show some sort of differentiation.
When aggregating all the genres however, the trend somewhat weakens, with only 71 of the top tracks being 1-month plus, which suggests that this trend might be coded just for genre, and is a cascading effect from genre-focused playlisting.
This would make sense given that when Alexa is engaged, user utterances would likely be something like “Alexa, play some country music” or something similar and giving those top artists more stream time. (sorry if I just triggered your Alexa)
Another interesting takeaway is how most of the 1.5-year plus tracks stack towards the top third of the chart, and almost exclusively in the Top 50, meaning that the bottom half of the Amazon charts tends to be more fluid.
So if you’re an emerging artist, expect your success on Amazon Music to be mostly all in or virtually nothing, and if you’re the small population getting lukewarm play, maybe it’s time to make some calls to push that track into that coveted upper Alexa stratosphere.
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday May 10th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.
Free accounts are at app.chartmetric.com/signup
And article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.
Happy Friday, have a great weekend!
4 min
May 03, 20192019-05-03 // Billboard Music Awards 2019: Ozuna and Lauren Daigle
Highlights
Drake took home a bag of Billboard Music Awards, but Ozuna and Lauren Daigle represent for the Latin and CCM fans
Mission
Good morning, it’s Jason here at Chartmetric with your 3-minute Data Dump where we upload charts, artists and playlists into your brain so you can stay up on the latest in the music data world.
FYI - the Chartmetric team will be in Nashville for the Music Biz Conference next week, so if you’re there, please say hello at our Wednesday night panel, but if not, the podcast will be back on Friday May 10th.
Date
This is your Data Dump for Friday May 3rd 2019.
Billboard Music Awards 2019: Ozuna & Lauren Daigle
The 2019 Billboard Music Awards, or BBMAs, happened on Wednesday night, and Drake took home the most awards with 12 and Cardi B showing up in 18 categories with 21 nominations total.
As a US-based company with the finalists determined by their own private award process, it would make sense that Billboard heavily decorated two of the biggest chart-topping artists in the English-speaking West.
But what about winners that are also big in their own right, but just catering to a different segment of the population?
Two of those winners are Puerto Rico’s Ozuna and Louisiana native Lauren Daigle. Ozuna is now one of Latin music’s biggest reggaetón artists and Daigle has risen to become a star in the Contemporary Christian Music genre.
It’s certainly arguable that neither artist should be put into a box, so to say, but the nature of the Billboard Award categories they won in- Top Latin Artist/Album/Song for Ozuna and Top Christian Artist/Album/Song for Daigle- certainly encourage that kind of thinking.
So in the data, it’s interesting to see how these conceptualizations play out, and where it doesn’t seem to matter much.
For example, with Ozuna, his mostly Spanish language content obviously plays towards Latin-American areas: his top five Spotify monthly listener cities are Mexico City, Santiago, Madrid, Buenos Aires and Lima.
With Daigle, hers are Dallas, Paris, Chicago, Atlanta and Los Angeles. A 2015 Gallup poll found that about 75% of the US identify as Christian, so it would make sense that Daigle plays best stateside, but a strong trend in Paris over the last few months is curious.
In the last three months alone, she grew her unique monthly listeners over 400% to 105K, while in the same time period, the other four top cities grew less than 30%.
Evidence of her success in the French-speaking capital is the fact that she was added to Paris-based Deezer Music’s #1 playlist- Les titres du moment with 9.8M fans- on April 6th, almost as a recognition that her popularity was cross-platform and not limited to just Spotify.
For Ozuna, while most of his top YouTube countries are Spanish-speaking (such as Mexico, Argentina and Colombia), his second biggest country is the United States at almost 16% of his Daily Views at 2.8M.
With the 2017 US Census reporting that 13% or almost 40M Americans speak Spanish, it makes sense that even a mostly English-speaking country outranks other Spanish-speaking countries due to sheer population size.
For example, Ozuna’s third biggest YouTube country, Argentina, has a total population of 45M, which is only slightly bigger than the US Spanish-speaking population at almost 40M.
So all of this to say that when targeting an artist’s demographic, it usually pays off to understand their market size and where they are, because some data trends are expected but sometimes, quite unexpected.
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday May 3rd 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.
Free accounts are at app.chartmetric.com/signup
And article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.
Happy Friday, have a great weekend! We’ll either see you in Nashville or here on the podcast next Friday!
4 min
May 02, 20192019-05-02 // Stagecoach 2019 Emerging Artists: Becca Mancari, Charley Crockett and Ruby Boots
Highlights
Country superstars headlined this past weekend’s Stagecoach festival in Indio, California...but who played the early afternoon slots and what does their data look like?
Mission
Good morning, it’s Jason here at Chartmetric with your 3-minute Data Dump where we upload charts, artists and playlists into your brain so you can stay up on the latest in the music data world.
Date
This is your Data Dump for Thursday May 2nd 2019.
Stagecoach & Non-Headliners
Stagecoach, “California’s Country Music Festival”, wrapped up this past weekend in Indio, on the same grounds that Coachella had been on the couple weeks prior.
While superstars Luke Bryan, Sam Hunt and Jason Aldean headlined each day of the weekend festival, what about the non-headliners? Who are they and how are they doing?
Billed last and in the smallest print on the Stagecoach lineup poster, Becca Mancari, Charley Crockett and Ruby Boots had their chance to make their mark in early afternoon performance slots on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, respectively.
Ruby Boots is a Nashville-based Australian with a more edgy indie rock/Americana sound and seems to be the most junior of the three, with 16K monthly listeners and 2K followers on Spotify.
Mancari sports a softer, acoustic folk persona and has the most monthly listeners at 183K and the best listener to follower ratio at 45.
Native Texan Charley Crockett goes for a retro album art look to accompany his Southern blues sound, and has the most followers at 17K and the highest Spotify Popularity Index score at 51.
An interesting takeaway emerges when looking at all three artists’ current playlists: Spotify seems to be the only platform really giving emerging country artists editorial attention.
Mancari, for example, is currently on 10 Spotify editorial playlists, including Infinite Acoustic at 2M follows, Acoustic Love at 1.4M and Evening Acoustic at 1.3M. Ruby Boots and Crockett are each on four editorial playlists themselves, while all three are on anywhere from 53 to 71 playlists total on the platform if including third-party curators.
Apple Music and Deezer however, feature none of the emerging country artists on any editorial playlists, which suggests less of a sensitivity towards the genre’s budding talent.
Amazon Music is somewhere in the middle: the tech giant’s platform includes all three artists on their official Stagecoach 2019 playlist, while Mancari features on Best Folk Songs of 2017 and Autumn Folk Sunset, while Crockett features on New in Blues and Americana Soul.
In terms of Stagecoach effects, Ruby Boots seems to have gained the most from her live performance: she saw a 74% increase in Spotify monthly listeners in Los Angeles since the day before last weekend, while Mancari only saw 20% and Crockett saw the least at 14%.
However, what the three artists all have in common is Instagram follower demographics: their male to female balance is about half, while their majority ethnicity is mostly White / Caucasian in the 80 and 90 percentiles.
Congratulations to these three artists on their big Stagecoard weekend and hopefully we’ll see more of them in the months to come.
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Thursday May 2nd 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.
Free accounts are at app.chartmetric.com/signup
And article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.
Happy Thursday, see you tomorrow!
4 min
May 01, 20192019-05-01 // Meme Check: It's Gonna Be Me by *NSYNC
Highlights
Meme check: It’s May 1st, and the *NSYNC track “It’s Gonna Be Me” becomes a thing again for 24 hours
Mission
Good morning, it’s Jason here at Chartmetric with your 3-minute Data Dump where we upload charts, artists and playlists into your brain so you can stay up on the latest in the music data world.
Date
This is your Data Dump for Wednesday May 1st 2019.
Meme check: It’s Gonna Be Me
For all the 80s & 90s children out there, we knew where American superstar Justin Timberlake came from, and it’s name was *NSYNC.
The boy band extraordinaire enjoyed many a hit in their day...but none of them have risen to such internet meme-dom as the track “It’s Gonna Be Me”, off their 2000 album No Strings Attached.
According to knowyourmeme, it all started in 2012 when a Tumblr post associated the song with the beginning of said month and a picture of Timberlake in his infamous curly hair era. The meme is essentially highlighting the way the singer accented the word “me” to where it sounded like the month of “May”.
It’s enough of a thing that the American appliance company Maytag is using it in a brilliant ad campaign this year entitled- you guessed it- #itsgonnabemaytag
Since late 2017, it’s enjoyed a Spotify Popularity Index in the 60s range out of a 100 scale, which is one of *NSYNC’s more popular tracks alongside the mid-tempo “Bye Bye Bye” and ballad “This I Promise You”.
Throughout 2018, “It’s Gonna Be Me” averaged a YouTube daily view count in the 40-50K range. Around May 1st, it peaked to about 5x its norm to 260K views, and then plateaued out to its average within a few days. It currently sits at 94.7M total views.
An interesting behavior in its YouTube views is that it doesn’t exhibit the “weekend spike” that usually occurs with popular music. Its pattern actually looks quite random, which could be an interesting insight into how the public interacts with various types of hits according to release date.
Current Top 40 hits will most likely show strong weekend bumps due to their being included on the most high-profile playlists that get played over the weekend, while older catalog hits are listened to at more random intervals and less susceptible to day of week behaviors.
“It’s Gonna Be Me” lives out its legacy on various 90s and 2000s best hits playlists, the most popular one being Spotify’s “All Out 90s” at 4.2M followers with the track in the 33rd position out of 90.
On radio since Sept 2018, it’s only got a handful of daily spins among the most influential 300 US radio stations, though the NE states seem to still love the track.
The Nassau-Suffolk, New York and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania markets have both aired “It’s Gonna Be Me” 65 and 51 times over the past eight months, and that hasn’t even included May!
So if you’re looking for a social media wave to ride today, make sure you hashtag properly, because hey #itsgonnabemay
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday May 1st 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.
Free accounts are at app.chartmetric.com/signup
And article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.
Happy May, see you tomorrow!
3 min
April 30, 20192019-04-30 // Technique Tuesday: The Game of Thrones soundtrack & track playlist distribution
Highlights
Technique Tuesday: The Game of Thrones album drops on Friday and we delve into its tracks’ playlist distribution
Mission
Good morning, it’s Jason here at Chartmetric with your 3-minute Data Dump where we upload charts, artists and playlists into your brain so you can stay up on the latest in the music data world.
Date
This is your Data Dump for Tuesday April 30th 2019.
Technique Tuesday: For The Throne album
Last Friday, HBO’s Game of Thrones worked with Sony’s Columbia Records to release the 14-track album For The Throne, featuring music inspired by the massive series across pop, rap, Latin, rock and folk genres.
Three of the tracks were released earlier in the month as teasers to the full-length album, and a few days in, it’s a great time to take a pulse of how its performing in the market.
We’ll do that by examining how the popularity among its tracks are distributed via their playlisting distribution.
The fan reaction on Spotify and Apple Music seem to be strong: if measured by total current playlists that the tracks are included on, For the Throne was on ~650 playlists on Spotify and ~130 on Apple Music.
To put that in perspective, it beats out the Greatest Showman soundtrack, which is on ~600 playlists on Spotify, but it wasn’t quite enough for others.
For example, the Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse soundtrack which was released in December of last year is currently on ~2200 Spotify playlists and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody is on an astonishing ~8900, though that soundtrack benefits from Queen’s tracks pre-existing for decades before they were included in the film’s album.
It’s worth noting that these albums are just like normal album releases in that they usually depend on a leading track to market the rest of the collection.
For For The Throne, that track is “Power is Power” by SZA, The Weeknd and Travis Scott, which is on 436 Spotify playlists, including the #17 position on Today’s Top Hits, while the next most playlisted track on the album is “Too Many Gods” by A$AP Rocky and Joey Bada$$ at 128 playlists, which is a decent dropoff.
The Greatest Showman soundtrack, which is unique among this group as it showcases the fact that its parent film is actually a musical, also shows a fairly well-distributed playlist dropoff among its three most playlisted tracks as they go from ~320, to ~290, then to ~150 playlists.
With the Spiderman soundtrack however, the dropoff is much higher, as Post Malone and Swae Lee’s massively popular “Sunflower” track is on ~1,850 playlists while the next track is only on ~200.
Now if a soundtrack is nothing more than a marketing device for its main product, maybe popularity distribution among its tracks is not such a big deal for the TV or film producers, but for the artists involved, it at least shows how much traction the actual music has, as the artists likely got involved for the exposure more than anything else.
The editorial playlist support is strong on Spotify, with 56 of those lists containing the album tracks, to include Today’s Top Hits at 23M followers, Teen Party at 3.9M and New Music Friday at 3.1M.
Apple Music’s editorial support however is much weaker, with only one A-List playlist listing any of the album’s tracks, and only three of their A&R-focused “Breaking” playlists (such as Breaking Alternative or Breaking Latino) doing the same.
So while the marketing support from the actual platforms can be touch and go, it should at least be comforting for For The Throne’s artists, to know that its fans on Spotify at least are getting their GoT fix via their earbuds, in between episodes.
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Tuesday April 30th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.
Free accounts are at app.chartmetric.com/signup
And article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.
Happy Tuesday, see you tomorrow!
4 min
April 29, 20192019-04-29 // New Music Friday Monday: Deezer’s Brand New UK playlist
Highlights
It’s New Music Friday Monday: Deezer’s Brand New UK playlist is all about pop this week and dominates Spotify’s New Music Friday playlists by follower count.
Mission
Good morning, it’s Jason here at Chartmetric with your 3-minute Data Dump where we upload charts, artists and playlists into your brain so you can stay up on the latest in the music data world.
Date
This is your Data Dump for Monday April 29th 2019.
Deezer: Brand New UK playlist
Always astute at differentiating segments of their international user base, Deezer separates several of their New Music Friday playlists by country. So much so that their #3 most followed playlist overall is actually one of them: the Brand New UK playlist.
At 5.9M fans, this frontline-focused playlist is curated by Adam - their UK & Ireland Editor, who also selects the Deezer Hits UK playlist and Trending Ireland playlists at 334K and 170K fans respectively.
Over the past year, Brand New UK exhibits a follower count history that curiously looks like a publicly traded stock price: going up for a few months, then going down for a few months.
It’s currently on an upswing, gaining over 500 fans over the past month, but it’s certainly different from the steady and rarely-wavering follower growth that most of Spotify’s top playlists have shown in recent years.
Nevertheless, Brand New UK remains one of Deezer’s flagship playlists and this week, is 32% pop, with 31 of the 60 tracks containing the tag.
Both rap and EDM come next with 7 genre tags each in this week’s list.
43% of the artists represented are from the United States, while 33% are from the UK. The rest of the list features artists from eight other territories including Sweden, Brazil, France.
Leading off in the #1 position is veteran grime rapper Stormzy with “Vossi Bop”, whose music video features actor Idris Elba and marks Stormzy’s first solo release since 2017.
Taylor Swift takes the #2 slot with Panic! At The Disco’s Brendon Urie for the track “ME!” and Lauv’s new single “Drugs & The Internet” slides into third place.
Brand New UK vs. other NMF playlists
Comparing with Spotify’s equivalent playlist, New Music Friday, the selection of artists based on nationality becomes quite clear early on.
On Brand New UK for example, Stormzy leads the top spot while on Spotify’s globally-focused list his track is in 46th place in the 99-track list.
Taylor Swift’s track position doesn’t change much on either playlist, because well, she’s Taylor Swift, but on Spotify we don’t see our next UK artist until the #12 position with FKA twigs’ “Cellophane”.
On Deezer, we already get our second UK artist with Nigerian-British Not3s in the #4 spot, who doesn’t show up at all in Spotify’s New Music Friday.
Genre-wise, the sounds of both playlists are still similar, as New Music Friday has the same top three genres: pop, rap and EDM. However, NMF skews heavier towards rap, as 21 of its tracks are tagged as such, when Deezer’s list only had 7.
And to make it all more complicated, Spotify has another playlist called New Music Friday UK, which looks much more like Deezer’s Brand New UK, as it has the same top 3 tracks for example.
Spotify’s version has a majority of UK artists, with 30 of them present in its 86-song list, with US artists coming in second place with 29 artists.
Despite all of that however, Deezer still wins out as its 5.9M fan playlist far outnumbers Spotify’s 709K followers for its UK NMF playlist, and even its global NMF at 3.1M.
So if you’re looking to keep up on Global Release Friday for the latest in UK music, check out Brand New UK on Deezer!
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Monday April 29th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.
Free accounts are at app.chartmetric.com/signup
And article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.
Happy Monday, see you tomorrow!
4 min

About How Music Charts

From the publisher's feed

Welcome to How Music Charts, a music business podcast by Chartmetric. Join the music industry's brightest minds as they bridge data, culture, and creativity in real time. Looking for more? Sign up for…

Share How Music Charts

Sign up to save your podcasts

How Music Charts

How Music Charts episodes

About How Music Charts

More shows like How Music Charts

Lavrushkin