HighlightsWe’re on the road! We’re at A2IM’s Indie Week in New York City, Day 1 is over and my feet hurt.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.DateThis is your Data Dump for Tuesday, June 18, 2019.A2IM Indie Week, Day 1Hi all, Jason reporting from New York City and this will admittedly be a quick one.Day 1 of Indie Week is over, wanted to first share some thoughts before we call it a night.In talks today with various labels, distributors, agencies and so on involved with different sectors of the music business, three takeaways were as follows:People might not always need super-charged, crazy data ninja magic insights...they simply want to know that they got on a playlist.Sometimes there’s so much going with multiple artists on a label roster or they have 30 Spotify or Apple for Artists tabs open, all with multiple tracks on playlists in different territories…...and you just want to know with a simple notification that a certain track made a playlist. We hear you, and simple can also be best.Stream count does not always equal revenue in other categories, like merchandise or branding opportunities or ticket sales.Dependent on genre or the way an artist engages with their fans, they may not be creating crazy streaming numbers on the typical music platforms, but they’ll still be selling out multiple shows or merch items.Maybe they resonate more on physical, or YouTube or terrestrial radio or TikTok, but the streaming playlist world isn’t the end all, be all.On the same token, just because an artist is highly touted with ba-jillion streams, doesn’t necessarily mean they do as well in other revenue categories.So make sure you’re taking all types of data into account, not just spins...any maybe what you really need to be tracking still has yet to find a quality, scalable data solution.Sharing data insights with your artists can help encourage desired behavior.Maybe your artist doesn’t like social media. Maybe they don’t want to tour in a particular part of town. Maybe they don’t want to work on a collaboration with another artist who could widen your fan base...these are all understandable things that from an artist’s perspective, might not be very obvious moves and might feel too “businessey” for them to buy into as a creative being.But most artists today I’d argue are quite data-savvy, and if you shared a certain chart of how that one Tweet you did get them to do helped get them 10 or 100 more followers for them to connect with down the road, all the better. Or that even though they just want to tour stateside...what if they saw their last EP over-indexed by 35% in monthly listeners in Jakarta, Indonesia in the past month...maybe it’s time to renew that passport?All this to say: of course you’re sharing your coolest data insights with your marketing team or promotion person or what have you….but consider being more proactive with sharing them with your artist, because they might just appreciate it!OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Tuesday, June 18, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.Happy Tuesday, we’ll see you tomorrow from Indie Week! Peace.

HighlightsTechnique Tuesday: The Game of Thrones album drops on Friday and we delve into its tracks’ playlist distributionMission   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.DateThis is your Data Dump for Tuesday April 30th 2019.Technique Tuesday: For The Throne albumLast 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.OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Tuesday April 30th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at app.chartmetric.com/signupAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.Happy Tuesday, see you tomorrow! 

HighlightsNSync performs at Coachella w/ Ariana Grande and Michael Jackson’s legacy deals with Leaving Neverland...but does this affect their music data?MissionGood 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.DateThis is your Data Dump for Wednesday April 17th 2019.Legacy acts in the spotlightMost of the time, music data is all about the frontline releases, the next emerging artists and global superstars...but what about legacy acts?Loosely defined, legacy acts are any artists that have had a successful career and have since left their glory days, yet still hold sway over the general public.In this sense, late 90s/early 2000s American boy band NSYNC and the late Michael Jackson fit this definition.But sometimes, the work of such acts bubble up again for one reason or another, and sometimes they are good, and sometimes not so much.Exhibit 1: Just this past Sunday, reigning American pop queen Ariana Grande invited NSYNC on stage (minus Justin Timberlake) to perform a few of their hits as part of her headlining set. The various teasers leading up to the event have given way to performance reviews on all the music outlets, and while the effect is diluted on Ms. Grande’s red-hot career, how does this affect the former group that haven’t released original material since 2001?Legacy acts on streaming services are an odd juxtaposition of the old and the new, but for NSYNC, they are enjoying streaming metrics that would otherwise be great for an up and coming act.At 6.1M Spotify monthly listeners and 914K followers, this gives them listener to follower ratio of 6.7, putting them ahead of Charli XCX and even Billie Eilish. This actually makes a lot of sense for the group, because a high ratio is usually the result of a highly loyal but small following with little to no marketing reach…and a now-defunct yet hugely famous 2000s boy band pretty much fits that bill to a T.In terms of immediate effects observed, they’re pretty much nil: no major editorial playlists on either Spotify, Apple, Amazon or Deezer added NSYNC records, and while their Spotify daily follower count jumped roughly 50%, it was only an additional 600 or so followers from their norm.If anything, their Twitter daily followers jumped 10x after Sunday and their Instagram daily followers popped 15x their norm, which makes sense given the very Instagrammable nature of Coachella, but already there seems to be no long-term effects.Now while there was a fun, no strings attached nature to the one-time Coachella performance, Michael Jackson’s legacy has recently taken a turn for the not-so-flattering.At the beginning of March, HBO released a documentary called Finding Neverland directed by British filmmaker Dan Reed, which focuses on the testimonials of two now-grown men that were allegedly sexually abused as children by the former King of Pop.Both traditional and social media were not quiet about the exposé, but  nevertheless, Michael Jackson’s music data profile doesn’t seem to have really experienced much of any difference: his Spotify daily follower patterns show no real changes  since March and his monthly listener count slowed slightly from 22.3M at the beginning of the month to 21.5M currently. This metric is largely buoyed by Drake’s sampling of Jackson in the track “Don’t Matter to Me” on Drake’s juggernaut album Scorpion.After Finding Neverland’s release, Jackson’s YouTube daily channel subscribers only briefly fluctuated to twice his average then cut in half from his average before returning back to normal, and his Wikipedia page views peaked at 6x his daily norm until returning back his average of about 30K views a few weeks after.What may be most interesting is how radio airplay has reacted: among 300 of the most influential US radio stations, they collectively went from spinning Jackson’s music roughly 100-150 times a day during the holiday months of Nov/Dec last year, and now trickling down to just 10 spins a day as of early April.Due to the limited airtime stations have and the more localized connection they have to their listeners, this might create more accountability and the need to insulate themselves from angry listeners revolted by the documentary.All in all, some say that in the show business, “any publicity is good publicity”, but from a music data perspective, at least for these artists, maybe it should be “any publicity doesn’t affect our legacy much.”OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday April 17th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.io/signupAnd article links and show notes are at a new website: podcast.chartmetric.com.Happy Wednesday, see you tomorrow! 

HighlightsCoachella Weekend 1 and the Game of Thrones Season 8 opener just dropped...so what does this mean for their playlists?MissionGood 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.DateThis is your Data Dump for Tuesday April 16th 2019.Coachella & Game of Thrones spotlightWhat should we think of event-based playlists? Are they important components of branding strategy? A fun extra for superfans? Or just a marketing afterthought that captures a few of curious bypassers?Most people involved in Western pop culture were tuned into either one of two things this past weekend: Coachella Week 1 happening in the deserts of California, or the Game of Thrones season 8 opener in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros.Let’s take a moment to examine both pop culture behemoths in the context of this larger question at hand. (I’ll consider the TV series Game of Thrones an “event” due to its recent season opener.)Both events maintain a curator profile on both Spotify and Apple Music. User “Coachella” is the obvious one for the music festival, while the show’s user profile is named “Game of Thrones” on Spotify, but on Apple Music, it is “Music from Game of Thrones”.Coachella on Spotify currently has six public playlists, with five of them focused on different parts of the day. For example, the “Made in the Shade” playlist is for chilling out in the morning, and “Nights and Lights” is for turning up at night.But most of Coachella’s 214K followers are for their “2019 Lineup” playlist, which is 161 songs long and runs for 10.5 hours. It’s mostly a one song per artist list, and frontline oriented.Childish Gambino currently sits in the #1 position on this playlist with the breezy “Feels Like Summer” track, and as of Sunday, had 38K unique monthly listeners coming from this playlist specifically, which is a pretty neat.Janelle Monae in the #5 spot got 26K monthly listeners from it and Smino, in the last #161 position got about 6.5K listeners. So if we assumed your average user played from beginning to end for a 10.5-hour playlist, still having 25% of your audience is not bad.However, it wouldn’t be surprising if for such a long list, users also shuffled and searched within it to find some sounds they liked...for the artist involved, it’s a decent way to get a few new followers as a side benefit of playing at the highly-coveted event.For Game of Thrones, it’s a different kind of involvement for the fan, though: the main draw is not the music, but the TV show, so playlists are like an extension of the brand.The Game of Thrones presence on Apple Music is rather straightforward: 50 tracks of Ramin Djawadi doing what the Emmy Award-winning score composer does.But for Spotify, the show takes a more creative tack: they have featured 30 different playlists based on characters in the show, featuring a picture of them and simply titled after their name.For example, hardcore warrior Khal Drogo at 3.2K followers features 25 songs of pure metal and the playlist for scheming queen Cersei Lannister starts off with Ariana Grande’s “Dangerous Woman”.The most popular playlist is for the righteous Jon Snow at 21.7K followers, so it’s not like these musical extensions of the characters are pulling major attention for the show or the music artists contained within them, but what does help is when Spotify officially backs you:The official Spotify-curated “Game of Thrones: The End is Coming” playlist sits at 155K followers, and features 3.5 hours of varied music, including Rage Against the Machine’s “Sleep Now in the Fire”.The rap-rock track, sitting in the #1 playlist spot, has drawn 128K unique monthly listeners to the band, for a track that was released back in 1999, which is great for them.So what does it all mean for events or brands? I guess it depends on how creative you are with it, and while it doesn’t draw major listening power, it provides a fun diversion for your true fans. And for artists? Why not get on them? Any attachment to a major cultural force can only be good for audience reach, and it’s virtually no additional work. And if that playlist is officially curated by Spotify, all the better.OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Tuesday April 16th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.io/signupAnd article links and show notes are at a new website: podcast.chartmetric.com.Happy Tuesday, see you tomorrow! 

HighlightsK-pop group BTS features American star Halsey on Spotify’s New Music Friday in the #4 slot for another global smash for both actsMissionGood 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.DateThis is your Data Dump for Monday April 15th 2019.New Music Friday MondayLet’s try out a new segment called New Music Friday Monday, where we dip into the data and artists behind a new release that came out over the weekend.On Friday April 12th, Korean boy band BTS continued their long-term strategy for the American market by enlisting the help of Jersey-born, LA-based singer Halsey in the new record “Boy With Luv”, who sings background vocals for the track.“Boy With Luv” is the key of B minor, with a speed of 120 beats per minute, which means that its upbeat tempo turns what’s normally a sad-sounding chord progression into a danceable, driving kind of tension. The Echo Nest score of 80 out of 100 in the Valence scale confirms that the song’s emotional sentiment is mostly positive, with a bit of sadness to it for good measure.The 3-minute and 49-second track is currently on 74 Spotify editorial playlists and 19 Apple Music editorial playlists, including the #6 spot on Today’s Top Hits and the #4 position on the Today’s Hits in US Apple storefront.You might guess that both superstar names have similar playlist footprints on either platform, but they are markedly different: for example on Spotify, about 3% of BTS’ total playlists they’re on are editorial, and Halsey’s portion of editorial playlists is about the same. However, Halsey’s total playlist reach is 208M followers, while BTS’ is 113M at the moment.Also, Halsey’s monthly listeners to follower ratio is at 5.9, which puts her in the viral realm of Billie Eilish and DJ Snake. BTS’s ratio is a somewhat unflattering 0.8, which puts them in the company of Justin Bieber and another K-pop boy band called BIGBANG, who both experienced public opinion issues as of late.One way to interpret these signals is that following an artist is a one-time action, whereas monthly listeners is an ongoing signal measured in a 28-day window. So for Bieber and BIGBANG, despite their popularity earning them high follower counts at their highest peak, their respective PR issues have cost them somewhat in recent listeners.However, why would this put the squeaky clean, up-and-coming BTS in the same ballpark? It’s hard to say, but one reason may actually be the strength of their marketing strategies: they’ve done such a good job at putting BTS in the spotlight via Western late night shows, talk radio, magazine interviews and awards appearances, that it’s earned them a lot of reach, but not enough engagement to keep up.For example, Chartmetric users, who are most strongly represented in Western countries, follow BTS the most on our tool, while superstars Drake and Ariana Grande are the #2 and #3 most followed, but only by a significant gap.Or to put it all of this simply, the curiosity is high, but the follow-through is still catching up.However, BTS also brings something to the table for Halsey, who not only makes an on-camera appearance in the “Boy With Luv” music video, but also dances choreography with them.BTS’ 16.6M Instagram followers are mostly based in Asia while over 40% of Halsey’s 12.4M followers are in the US and Brazil. Despite playing shows across the Pacific, this BTS collaboration brings Halsey front and center to a whole new demographic.And now that the video’s become the most viewed debut in the first 24 hours in YouTube history, Halsey has now cemented her place in the ever-evolving story of BTS, all around the world.OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Monday April 15th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.io/signupAnd article links and show notes are at: chartmetric.transistor.fm/episodes.Happy Monday, see you tomorrow! 

HighlightsToday’s Top Hits at almost 23M followers remains Spotify’s crown jewelBillboard Emerging Artist Kiana Ledé begins to spread her wings MissionGood 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.DateThis is your Data Dump for Wednesday April 10th 2019.Playlist Highlight With 9M more followers than the #2 Spotify playlist, Today’s Top Hits remains playlist supreme on the Swedish streaming platform.Growing at 1% (or ~170K) followers in the past month, the list is at 22.9M of them and is due to break the 23M mark within a month.For the past 2.5 years, it’s been disciplined at keeping only 50 tracks, though this week, it’s added a few more to total 53.Leading that list is Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus with the “Old Town Road - Remix”, and American singer-songwriter Alec Benjamin in the #2 spot with the sad breakup song “Let Me Down Slowly”.The inescapable Billie Eilish holds down the bronze medal at #3 with the kick-drum-driven “bad guy” off her hot new album.55% of Today’s Top Hits this week comes from American artists, while 10% of the list comes from the United Kingdom, including Glasgow’s indietronica CHVURCHES and London-based Rita Ora in a collaboration with Brazil’s Anitta.Puerto Rico contributes to about 5% of the list with tracks from reggaetón kings Daddy Yankee, Ozuna and Farruko.In terms of track adds and removals, most of the frontline playlist gets added on Global Release Friday, but Today’s Top Hits tends to remove tracks more loosely across Thursday, Friday and Saturday.In the past month, 58% of the tracklist got refreshed, and the adds are typically new releases. This week for example, 31 of the 53 tracks are brand new.Despite Today’s Top Hits reputation as a place for new records, it’s good to remember that once a track gets put on, it tends to live there: over 75% of the historical tracks they’ve placed stay on for 1-6 months.For a deeper dive, check out our Today’s Top Hits blog post in the show notes.Artist Highlight“I don't gotta be in love with you to love you”. That is a lyric from Phoenix-born, LA-based artist Kiana Ledé, who is hiding down in the #46 spot of Today’s Top Hits with the sultry and bittersweet breakup track “EX”.The R&B singer who moonlighted as an actor on MTV’s Scream and Netflix’s All About the Washingtons, her music career has been on a major marketing push since last month.With 5.2M Spotify monthly listeners and 213K followers, this puts her at an excellent listener to follower ratio of 25. For context, AWAL superstar Lauv is at 24.1 and young American pop star MAX at 25.3.Ledé’s playlist situation completely blew up in March, adding the 4.9M follower Are & Be Spotify playlist and 1.8M follower Hot Rhythmic playlist, as well as being added to the sexual contextual playlists Love, Sex and Water at 1.6M and Bedroom Jams just under 1M.She’s in the #33 position on the 65-track Today’s Hits Apple playlist in the US, and virtually all of the storefronts for the A-List: R&B playlist, ranging from position #16-33 depending on the country.On Amazon Music, she’s on six editorial playlists, including the genre-focused Introducing: / Fresh / and Chill R&B playlists.Not limited to digital, her radio play in the South is strong with over 430 radio spins in Florida, 374 spins in Lousiana and 343 spins in Texas since the beginning of the year.With her smooth sound, Hollywood connections and her recent publicity push on Billboard, we’re sure to see more of Ms. Ledé in the months to come.OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday April 10th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Feel free to sign up for a free account at chartmetric.io/signupAnd article links and show notes are at: chartmetric.transistor.fm/episodes.Happy Wednesday, see you tomorrow.