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How Music Charts

2019-03-15 – 2022-04-12 Podcasts Visit website ↗

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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 a free account at chartmetric.com, subscribe to Beats & Bytes at blog.chartmetric.com, and reach out on our socials.

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The Top YouTube Playlists to Land On

2019-08-16 Listen
podcast_episode
Rutger (Chartmetric)

Highlights  YouTube’s global importance is no secret, but monitoring its playlist performance hasn’t always been easy. Using our new YouTube Playlists chart, you can finally track which lists are getting the most play!Mission   Good morning, it’s Rutger 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.We’re on the socials at “chartmetric” — that’s Chartmetric, no “S.” Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, and talk to us! We’d love to hear from you.DateThis is your Data Dump for Friday, August 16th, 2019.The Top YouTube Playlists to Land OnIf you’re tracking YouTube playlists as part of your daily routine, or if you want to start thinking about a digital strategy for the platform, then you’re in luck.Thanks to our brand new feature, you can check the rankings of more than 500 YouTube-curated playlists, sorting by total playlist views, number of videos, 28-day add ratio and last update date. Then, you can click through to see who's charting on the world's biggest video streaming platform.As it stands now, YouTube’s Popular Music Videos playlist is far and away the top performer with more than 1B total views, 200 tracks, and a 99 percent 28-day add ratio.It’s heavily weighted with Pop, Hip-Hop, and Rap artists from the USA — think Ariana Grande, Chris Brown, and Rick Ross — but R&B, Latin, and Reggaeton aren’t too far behind.In the No. 2 spot is the 72-track Pop Hotlist playlist, which has about a third of the views and half of the 28-day add ratio of the Popular Music Videos playlist.Katy Perry, OneRepublic, and Puerto Rican rapper Anuel AA rule this one — as does the USA, once again. YouTube has a number of genre-specific Hotlists, actually, including the Latin Hotlist at No. 4, the Hip-Hop and R&B Hotlist at No. 5, the Country Hotlist at No. 6, and the Regional Mexican Hotlist at No. 7.The No. 3 spot, however, goes to New Music This Week, which has a bit more than 300M views and a 100 percent 28-day add ratio.While Pop holds about a third of the market share on it, with R&B and Rap tied for second at a bit less than a tenth, Country rounds out third, tying with Hip-Hop and Metropopolis. USA dominates the playlist again, holding almost ¾ of the artist country market share.With such a global platform, you might expect to see less American representation and more international representation, but keep in mind, these market shares describe artist-track distribution on the playlists and not listener geography.So, Americans might be pumping out the majority of the content that’s landing on these playlists, but the global community is likely forcing it to the top. OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday, August 16th, 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.Free accounts are available at chartmetric.com And article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Friday, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you next week!

Music on TikTok Top Tracks and Trending Videos

2019-08-15 Listen
podcast_episode
Jason Joven (Chartmetric)

Highlights  TikTok is the new game, but it’s already the 2nd quarter. Let’s dive into one of our newest features, TikTok Top Track and Trending Videos charts.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.We’re on the socials at “chartmetric”, that’s Chartmetric, no “S ”- follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, and talk to us! We’d love to hear from you.DateThis is your Data Dump for Thursday, August 15th, 2019. TikTok Top Tracks and Trending VideosIf you are involved in music marketing at all, or you have a Gen Z-er in your life, you know about TikTok.Owned by Beijing-based Internet company ByteDance, TikTok is arguably the newest place to be when it comes to music discovery, and it’s hard not to be when you take over the giant lip-sync app that was Musical.ly.Earlier this year, ByteDance hit over 1B downloads across their suite of apps, 100M of them in the US and 250M of them in India, according to CNN.Some of its biggest stars are just regular people: teens dancing, moms decorating cookies, people playing practical jokes on each other….but it’s all frequently set to music.So who’s winning that never-ending game for eyes and ears on TikTok?As of yesterday, the top track used was none other than Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Old Town Road (remix)”, with 9.3M videos using the now record-breaking track.One thing to note about TikTok as a music platform is that-at least in its current state-it’s not the neatest from a metadata perspective. It’s more about the users’ creativity.As users are free to record and upload video and audio like YouTube, songs can be uploaded with no identifying song name or artist to keep track.Or in Lil Nas X’s case, duplicates. There were two original track copies of “Old Town Road” in the 28th and 34th positions on the top tracks chart yesterday, with 2.3 and 2M videos respectively. So if you include remixes, the track is definitely the top one on the Chinese platform with over 13.6M TikTok videos with the yeehaw anthem.And while there is a Trending Video chart, where Mariah Carey’s 2009 track “Obsessed” is currently the soundtrack for the #1 and #2 videos, you don’t have to go to the trending chart to find non-Top 40 tracks.For example, Why Mona’s 2017 moody electronic cover of the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” took the #2 spot yesterday with 9.2M videos, due to its viral dance that many users uploaded the song with.In 4th place with 7.6M videos is Sean Kingston’s 2007 track “Beautiful Girls”, where lots of TikTok-ers are do a cute hand dance or some Fortnite moves.Or in 135th place with 791K videos is none other than ABBA, with their 1986 track “Gimme! Gimme! Gimmie!”, because it has a nice “reveal” type of drop into its chorus. Users like to provide some kind of visual surprise or fun moment when it hits.So if you’ve got a catalog track ripe for memes, let her rip, because the world awaits its next hashtag!Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Thursday, August 15th, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Our new TikTok Top Tracks and Trending Video charts are now live, check them out with a free account at chartmetric.com Article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Thursday, we’ll see you tomorrow!

When Streaming Gets Political, Who Gets the Vote?

2019-08-09 Listen
podcast_episode
Andrew Yang (Democratic candidate) , Rutger (Chartmetric) , Cory Booker (Democratic candidate) , Marianne Williamson (Democratic candidate) , Beto O'Rourke (Democratic candidate) , Joe Biden (Democratic candidate) , Kamala Harris (Democratic candidate)

Highlights  We do our best to stay out of the political fray, but with the Democratic debates wrapping last week, we look at the candidates’ streaming profiles to get a sense of not only who they’re listening to — but who is listening to them. Mission   Good morning, it’s Rutger 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.We’re on the socials at “chartmetric”, that’s Chartmetric, no “S ”- follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, and talk to us! We’d love to hear from you.DateThis is your Data Dump for Friday, August 9th, 2019.When Streaming Gets Political, Who Gets the Vote?Think profiles and playlists are only for artists? Think again.We do our best to stay out of politics, but with the debates wrapping last week, why not look at the candidates’ streaming profiles to get a sense of not only who they’re listening to — but who is listening to them ... and how?Since no one is vying for the Republican nomination, with Trump seeking a second term, we’ll look at six of the Democratic candidates: Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Andrew Yang, Beto O’Rourke, Joe Biden, and Marianne Williamson.Booker’s Cory Booker’s Music playlist might only have around 150 followers, but what it lacks in popularity it makes up for in track popularity, with almost half of its 101 tracks at a popularity score of 60 or above.At around 180 followers, Biden’s streaming profile has about the same count as Booker’s playlist — but only 22 monthly listeners. Harris’ Kamala’s Summer Playlist ups the ante with more than 4,000 followers tuning into her heavily rap, hip-hop, soul, and funk oriented 46-song listing. O’Rourke’s BBQ for Beto has some 500 followers listening to his 94-song playlist, which ranges in genre from folk to classic rock and country to hardcore punk.Keep in mind, O-Rourke used to play in punk bands, so he definitely knows what’s up in that regard.As might be expected, Williamson’s streaming profile is heavily geared toward meditation, prayer, and motivational speeches — and it’s paying off.Williamson’s follower count is almost 1,800 with a Spotify monthly listener count of around 1,200, helping to make her listeners to followers ratio about 1 to 1.Perhaps most interesting, and maybe most unsurprising, is that her daily Wikipedia views shot up from some 12,000 to some 350,000 following the debate, correlating strongly with a daily change in her Instagram followers from around 600 to around 11,000 on Aug. 1.Yang’s Favorite Jams playlist leaves the others in the dust with more than 5,000 followers — despite it being primarily catalogue based.Oh, and in case you didn’t know, Yang appears to really enjoy Florence & the Machine and the Cure.Streaming performance might not be an indication of political performance, but it does give us some insight into who these candidates are looking to win over — or at least how good their music taste is.Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday, August 9th, 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.Free accounts are available at chartmetric.com Article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Friday, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you next week!

Katy Perry, Flame and the Effects of Publicity

2019-08-07 Listen
podcast_episode
Jason Joven (Chartmetric)

Highlights  What happens when a global artist gets sued by another for copyright infringement? Not much for the former, but a notable increase for the latter...we’re talking about music data by the way, not legal damage payments.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.We’re on the socials at “chartmetric”, that’s Chartmetric, no “S ”- follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, and talk to us! We’d love to hear from you.DateThis is your Data Dump for Wednesday, August 7th, 2019.Katy Perry, Flame and the Effects of PublicityWe’ve all seen industry gossip and trade news before...but have you ever used it to measure the impact of publicity?For the past week, both general and industry news sources have been reporting on the lawsuit of American rap artist Flame and the alleged copyright infringement of Katy Perry and team on her widespread 2013 hit, “Dark Horse”.Though debate still rages in the industry on whether it was valid in the eyes of copyright law, the jury itself decided it was indeed infringement, and ordered the American pop star and songwriting team to pay $2.78M in collective damages to the defendant.From a data perspective, what’s interesting is how this kind of news affects their digital profiles.For example, looking at the past week of social and streaming data for Katy Perry since news of the lawsuit first broke around July 30th, there was….basically no effect.No extra playlists or apparent correlation to Instagram follower count or Spotify monthly listeners….just more Katy Perry-level numbers, which is more than 7K new daily Spotify followers, 13M more daily YouTube views and 21K new daily IG followers….all in a day’s work.But for a lesser known artist like the Christian rapper Flame, he did experience a notable increase in digital profile.As of late, Flame in comparison had only gained about 67 new daily Spotify followers and 184 new YouTube daily views….and actually did score a few new charts.For example, “Joyful Noise”, which was the 2009 Flame track that was allegedly knowingly copied from by the Perry team, charted on official Viral 50 Spotify daily charts for the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Canada.It was for one day on August 2nd, a few days after the news had been able to make the news rounds in places like the Guardian, Rolling Stone, the BBC and Associated Press, and the track itself sat in the 13th, 15th and 24th respective positions on the 50-track viral charts.Its YouTube video went from 1800 daily views on Monday July 30th to more than 580 times that, peaking on July 31st at over 1M daily views….even the track’s Genius page, which only had less than 10 daily views the week prior, jumped to 740 the week of the proceedings.More than the track itself, Flame’s general artist profile gained 331 Spotify followers on July 31st, almost 5x his recent daily average, and his Spotify monthly listener count as of Monday August 5th has more than doubled in size to over 500K from his count only a week prior.He experienced similar multiples of increase in Twitter followers, retweets and Wikipedia views.So what does this mean for the rest of us? Possibly, a way to measure the effects of publicity….it’s virtually impossible to do so on a global superstar, but with an artist with a relatively little daily digital footprint, we can see which platforms are most affected by such news on certain given sources...and maybe be able to plan for future publicity expectations when working with your own artists.Because as they say in the show biz, “Any publicity is good publicity.”Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday, August 7th, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are available at chartmetric.com Article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Wednesday, see you on Friday!

How 2019’s Playlist Growth Might Affect Emerging Artists

2019-08-02 Listen
podcast_episode
Rutger (Chartmetric) , Jason Joven (Chartmetric)

Highlights  Spotify, Apple Music, and Deezer’s biggest playlists are growing — both in terms of follower count and also track count — but what does that mean for artists looking to land a big add?Mission   Good morning, it’s Rutger 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.We’re on the socials at “chartmetric”, that’s Chartmetric, no “S ”- follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, and talk to us! We’d love to hear from you.Feature: Labels PageHey Rutger, it’s Jason — sorry to interrupt, but can I just do a quick product update? Of course, what’s up?Thanks, man. Hi Chartmetric fans, you may or may not have gotten a chance to check out the new Labels Page feature that we discussed in the last podcast episode this week.We’ve temporarily pulled the feature back from its soft release because we just don’t think it’s up to the music analytics standard we strive for.If you’ve been with us for some time, you’ve seen how dedicated we are to innovating and as we say in the tech world, sometimes “breaking things”.Well, we’ve gotten a lot of your feedback and realize that we jumped the gun a bit early and we need to better clean, organize and visualize the label metadata that we have, which is what we do best.So we recognize the issue, and we are working swiftly to bring the Labels Page back with verve and more importantly, accuracy!Back to our regularly scheduled program, take it away, Rutger!Thanks, Jason!DateThis is your Data Dump for Friday, August 2nd, 2019.How 2019’s Playlist Growth Might Affect Emerging ArtistsThese days, getting onto streaming’s top playlists is sort of the name of the game.It really determines the visibility of emerging artists and cements the longevity of established ones.So, it got us wondering…. What’s been going on on the top playlists in 2019?Hitting the Playlists tab on the Chartmetric homepage brings up tons of playlist information for Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, and Amazon.From there, we can compare everything going on when it comes to the playlists claiming the top spots across a number of different measurements.On Spotify, Today’s Top Hits maintains the highest follow number, starting the year off with 22.3M and hitting 23.6M by the end of June.That’s 5.8 percent increase for that six month period.On Deezer, Les Titres Du Moment claims the top follower spot, and over the same period, experienced only about 1 percent growth from 9.8M followers to 9.9M followers.Digging in a bit deeper, we can also compare playlist length, aka number of tracks.For that six month period, for example, Spotify’s Hot Country playlist grew 31.4 percent in length, while Apple Music’s The A-List: Pop playlist grew the same amount.But those aren’t the highest numbers. Spotify’s EDM-focused Mint playlist grew 35.8 percent, and Apple’s Hip-Hop-oriented Gymflow playlist grew 66.7 percent.Overall, Apple added more tracks to its top playlists than Spotify did — about 11 percent vs. 23 percent, to be exact. The growth of these playlists, both in terms of follower count and also track count, means a higher chance of an emerging artist landing on one of them and a significant increase in visibility if they do.However, it also makes it more likely that they get lost in the noise, making it hard to capitalize on an otherwise super exciting add.Knowing the genre breakdown of tracks and also the country distribution of artists can help, but we’ll have to save that for another episode. You can also tell us what you find by doing your own digging at chartmetric.com!Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday, August 2nd, 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.Article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comAnd if you like what we’re doing, don’t forget to leave us a rating or review!Happy Friday, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you next week!

New Feature: Labels Page

2019-07-31 Listen
podcast_episode
Jason Joven (Chartmetric)

Highlights  Are you a manager looking for a quick summary of a record label you’re talking to? Maybe you want to compare the label you work for with a competitor? We’ve got a solution for you in our new Labels Page!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.We’re on the socials at “chartmetric”, that’s Chartmetric, no “S ”- follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, and talk to us! We’d love to hear from you.DateThis is your Data Dump for Wednesday, July 31st, 2019.New Feature: Labels PageDebuting this week is a new feature simply called the Labels Page! We’re still putting tweaks on how we’re visualizing and organizing the data, but we’re hoping you can get a good idea of what certain imprints have been up to lately.First and foremost, it isn’t an exhaustive list of labels in our entire database, because that would equal long load times.So we try to focus on more active labels with better known tracks.Specifically, this translates to labels that have released at least one track on Spotify with a Popularity Index of 40 or higher, in the past three years.The Labels List defaults to the highest number of such popular releases in the past 3 years......with Sony Music Entertainment having the most with 747 as of today, Columbia Records in 2nd with 711 and then RCA Records in 3rd place with 432.So notice that we are currently displaying both parent group labels as well as label imprints alongside each other, since this is how we receive tracks’ metadata, but we’ll keep optimizing this down the road.Once you click on various labels, we display their artists who’ve released in the past 60 days, along with releases in the past three years and even each label’s social media followers over time!For example, you can check out that Sony Music Latin’s top performer in the past 60 days is CNCO, the Latin boy band that we blogged about back in December 2017 (link in the show notes).CNCO is at a 78 Spotify Popularity Index, with an impressive 5.7M followers on the platform and 9.3M monthly listeners.Their latest release on the label was “De Cero” a little over a month ago on June 23rd, which is also on 43 Apple Music playlists, 25 Amazon Music playlists and 18 Deezer ones...which you can see quickly here in one page.You will also be able to get quick personalities of labels via their release numbers…...for example, Armada Music, as an electronic label, doesn’t have many releases that got over 60 on the Spotify Popularity Index in the past three years, as electronic as a genre has never been the strongest type of music on Spotify (which we also blogged about in Jan 2018, link in show notes).However, Armada has released 810 tracks in the past three years that we’re tracking, while similarly electronic genre labels do a similar pace like Monstercat at 785 and Ultra at 767.You can compare this with the 442 that 300 Entertainment has put out in the same time period, which is still a fast pace at over 12 releases per month...to be expected for a rap label in a genre that is well-known for constantly dropping new music.Get to know foreign labels like India’s T-Series or Brazil’s Som Livre via our Labels feature as well...we’ll surely include more label analysis down the road, but for now, check it out yourself with a free account at chartmetric.comOutro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday, July 31st, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Wednesday, see you on Friday!

Odd Subgenres Gaining Ground on Streaming’s Top Playlists

2019-07-26 Listen
podcast_episode
Rutger (Chartmetric)

Highlights  What’s in a name? For the subgenre game on Spotify, Apple, Deezer, and Amazon’s top playlists … a lot.Mission   Good morning, it’s Rutger 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.We’re on the socials at “chartmetric”, that’s Chartmetric, no “S ”- follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, and talk to us! We’d love to hear from you.DateThis is your Data Dump for Friday, July 26th, 2019.Odd Subgenres Gaining Ground on Streaming’s Top PlaylistsEver heard of Brostep, Lilith, Etherpop, Crunk, Redneck, Metropopolis, or Pagode?No? Well, chances are, you’ve listened to examples of some of these subgenres, because they now comprise a small but significant portion of the top playlists on Spotify, Apple, Deezer, and Amazon.Thanks to the new subgenre feature on our Artists tab, where we've categorized the more than 7,000 Spotify genre tags into a handful of parent genres, finding artists that fit these niche descriptors is easy.Just select the main genre and then scroll through the subgenres to filter to your heart’s content.If we apply this taxonomy to Spotify’s Hot Country playlist, which boasts around 5.5M followers, Redneck and Brostep account for 5.7 and 2.9 percent of that playlist’s track distribution when it comes to genre market share.What exactly do those subgenres sound like? Well, let’s just say that Redneck is REALLY country and Brostep is in-your-face Dubstep. On Get Turnt, which also has around 5.5M followers, Crunk has 1.6 percent of the playlist’s genre makeup.The Subgenre is also featured on Apple Music’s Rap Life, #OnRepeat, It’s Lit!!!, and Gymflow playlists, and on Amazon’s Rap Rotation playlist, finding its low at 0.8 percent and its high at 2.9 percent.Crunk actually emerged as a subgenre of Hip-Hop during the ‘90s in the American South.Crank it up.Deezer’s Brand New UK and Neue Hits playlists, meanwhile, feature something called Metropopolis, which is apparently a neologism of Spotify’s and includes artists like Charli XCX, Bleachers, and St. Vincent.That portmanteau — think urban pop — sits at 5.6 percent on Brand New UK (tied with House) and at 5.1 percent on Neue Hits (tied with Rap).Apple’s The A-List: Pop playlist and Amazon’s Pop Hits playlist share a subgenre called Etherpop, which sounds pretty self-explanatory as a combination of ethereal and pop.It wins out on Amazon, where it has 2.9 percent share of the playlist (tied with Emo and R&B) vs. 1.2 on Apple, where it’s tied with Rap, House, K-Pop, and yup, Metropopolis.And that brings us to two subgenres exclusive to Deezer and Amazon’s top playlists, respectively.On Deezer, the Pagode subgenre is seeing success on its Top Brazil and Explosão Brasil playlists, which makes total sense, considering it’s a form of Samba.Brazilians love it, too, as it dominates Explosão Brasil with a 20.8 percent share and comes in third on Top Brazil with 13.3 percent.Lilith, which claims 2.1 percent on Amazon’s Fresh Country and 5.8 percent on Amazon’s I Miss the ‘90s, seems to also be a geo-specific subgenre, with its roots in the Canadian-American traveling music festival, Lilith Fair, which featured an inspiring number of female-fronted folk and rock acts in the ‘90s.If you’re curious about what artists might fall into each of these subgenres — Brostep to Lilith, Etherpop to Crunk, Redneck to Metropopolis, or Pagode to … C86? — you’re in luck with our subgenre filter. Nerd out for free with a Chartmetric account!Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday, July 26th, 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Friday, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you next week!

Data Predictions for the 2019 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs)

2019-07-24 Listen
podcast_episode
Jason Joven (Chartmetric)
C++

Highlights  The MTV Video Music Awards are back for 2019 and the ballots are open! We’ll take a look at who’s up for what and from a data perspective, who might win!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.We’re on the socials at “chartmetric”, that’s Chartmetric, no “S ”- follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, and talk to us! We’d love to hear from you.DateThis is your Data Dump for Wednesday, July 24th, 2019.VMAsThe 2019 MTV Video Music Awards take place in New Jersey’s Prudential Center on Aug 26th.Started in 1984, the 36th installment of the annual ceremony will continue to draw together the music industry’s brightest stars, and their biggest fans, to celebrate the music video medium.Voting for performer categories have been open to the public since 2006, and for 2019, the virtual ballots will be open until Aug. 15.Looking at the artists with the most nominations, the data is very clear that the ceremony is about the biggest stars today:Coming out with 10 nominations each are Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish with 9 and Lil Nas X with 8. This is for the performer categories, of which there are 14, while professional category voting (such as Best Art Direction) are closed off to qualified personnel.All four of these artists have Spotify Popularity Indices higher than 92, Monthly Listener counts above 39M, and Chartmetric rankings of 20 or above.Interestingly, their YouTube subscriber counts vary widely, with Grande and Swift with 36M and 34M each, Eilish at 16M and Lil Nas X around 4.5M.Since subscriber count on YouTube reflects a long-term public interest in an artist, and to a certain degree, the seniority of any creator, it says something about how MTV nominates its artists, which seems to be a closed process.By nominating Grande and Swift the most, who have both been active since 2008 and 2004 respectively, it’s nodding to the more veteran players in the industry.But with Eilish and Lil Nas X, who have been active only since 2015 and 2018, it understandably shows the awards to also be a measurement who’s hot now.But who will win what? What are your predictions, Chartmetric?Well, we can’t say for sure, but what we can do is pretend certain metrics are the best predictors for each category.For example, if Video of the Year came down to straight YouTube views, Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus’ “Old Town Road (Remix)” would leave everyone else in the dust at 551M views, several steps ahead of the #2 runner up, which would be Eilish’s “bad guy” at 406M.If Song of the Year came down to Spotify Monthly Listeners, then it’d be (surprise, surprise) Lil Nas X again at 48M and then Drake as runner-up with 45M.Finally, if Artist of the Year came down to Chartmetric’s Cross-Platform Performance ranking, then the winner would be Shawn Mendes, who’s ranked #3 in our systems, with Ariana coming in 2nd in the MTV category with an 11th Chartmetric CPP ranking.But who knows which artists the people will vote for next month, we’ll just have to tune in and see!Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday, July 24th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Wednesday, and we’ll see you Friday!

What Follower Counts Say About Social and Streaming Trends

2019-07-19 Listen
podcast_episode
Josh Hayes (Chartmetric) , Rutger (Chartmetric)

Highlights  Is there any relation between follower counts on streaming services and follower counts on social media? Here’s a sneak peek at the trends we’re tracking for some of the biggest artists in the world.Mission   Good morning, it’s Rutger 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.Don’t forget to reach out to us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn! We’d love to hear from you.DateThis is your Data Dump for Friday, July 19th, 2019.What Follower Counts Say About Social and Streaming TrendsIn the old days, customers became fans if they not only bought CDs but also concert tickets — consistently and repeatedly.In the digital era, the live space is still important, but streaming platform followers and social media followers are the new metrics for measuring fandom. But does streaming popularity correlate with social media popularity?Is it consistent across the board, or does each streaming platform relate differently to each social platform?To test out these queries, we pulled follower data for artists topping the charts from January through June, and then determined the correlation coefficients for Spotify and Instagram, Spotify and Twitter, and Spotify and Facebook, repeating this process for YouTube, SoundCloud, and Deezer.What panned out from all of our calculations and pretty charts? For the whole story, you’ll have to stay tuned for something special we have in the works for the near future.In the meantime, here’s a teaser: One thing that pops out immediately is how poorly Facebook is correlated with streaming services across the board.If we take the average correlation across eight of the top artists for the past six months, Facebook turns up negligible negative correlation coefficients for Spotify and YouTube and negligible positive correlation coefficients for SoundCloud and Deezer.Instagram, on the other hand, turns up near one-to-one correlations with Spotify and YouTube.Twitter correlates pretty well with each streaming service — but nowhere near the Instagram correlation.In the words of our resident Data Scientist Josh Hayes, “Seems like many of the platforms are moving in similar directions together … except for Facebook.”While Facebook owns both platforms, it’s apparent, at least for the top performing artists, that Facebook Fan growth has either stopped, declined, or failed to keep pace with follower growth on four streaming services.Naturally, the story gets a bit more complicated as we begin to look at trends for particular artists, genres, and more, but hang in there — the full story is coming soon!OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday, July 19th 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Friday, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you next week!

Latin America "Trigger" Cities

2019-07-17 Listen
podcast_episode
Jason Joven (Chartmetric) , Chaz Jenkins (Chartmetric)

Highlights  In Part 3 of the music "trigger cities" mini-series, we explore the music tastes of Mexico City, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janiero, Bogotá, Lima and Santiago.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.We’re on the socials at “chartmetric”, that’s Chartmetric, no “S ”- follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, and talk to us! We’d love to hear from you.DateThis is your Data Dump for Wednesday, July 17th, 2019.Latin America "Trigger" CitiesIn case you missed them, we have been working on a written mini-series called “trigger cities”, it’s a concept that Chartmetric’s Partner and Advisor, Chaz Jenkins, an international marketing guru coined many years ago.It’s the idea that in the streaming environment, our algorithms on YouTube, Spotify and all platforms are connected with the tastes of huge cities around the world who also love the same apps.Lauv, the uber-successful independent artist first saw playlist success with his 2017 hit “I Like Me Better” in Southeast Asia! Lauv...is not Asian, but SE Asians adore great pop love songs.Reggaeton from the likes of huge superstars like Colombia’s J Balvin and Puerto Rico’s Bad Bunny are now on top playlists like Spotify’s Today’s Top Hits, a primarily English-language playlist...but their come-up was based on Latin American listeners supporting them more than any other region.So in the interest of knowing what the local markets are like, we wrote about  seven different metropolitan areas in Latin America: Mexico City, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janiero, Bogotá, Lima and Santiago.Five speak Spanish, two speak Brazilian Portuguese, and all love the YouTube.It’s a known fact that Latin America turns to the Google platform more than anything else to listen to music, and the numbers are quite impressive: Bogotá, despite having less than half (10.7M) of Mexico City’s population, took the #1 spot in YouTube views in one week last month with 26.5M views across 1.6M+ artists. The Mexican capital, however, was not far behind with 24.8M, and the two cities seem to be leading YouTube’s consumption in the region, with Lima a distant #3 with 17.1M views.On Spotify, Mexico City-as Spotify’s proclaimed “World’s Music-Streaming Mecca”-took the top spot in the same week with 2.3B non-unique monthly listeners (and this is admittedly odd metric, check the show notes for a link to the explanation), far outstripping Santiago in the #2 spot with 1.5B non-unique monthly listeners (MLs).When it comes to genres, we compiled genre tags on Shazam chart occurrences in these seven cities and found what sounds each city was most curious about when they flipped out their phones.“Urbano latino”-which is primarily reggaeton and Latin trap and the most popular in Santiago, Lima and Bogotá-didn’t show up at all in Brazil, with Brazilian-native genres such as “Sertanejo” (Brazilian country music) asserting their unique identity in the region, with Pop/Rock/Dance all showing strongly in the past month for both cities.This is contrary to the idea that all of Latin America loves reggaeton...just not true.On Instagram, who do you think are the ten most followed artists in the region?Well there’s Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande and Beyoncé…...there’s also Maluma and Daddy Yankee...But do you know pop queen Anitta, local icon Ivete Sangalo, comedian-entertainer Whindersson Nunes or the Beyoncé-inspired Ludmilla? They’re all Brazilian, showing how much Brazilians love IG, and also how much they love their own country’s artists.So there’s a taste of Part 3 of our trigger cities mini-series, please do check it out on Medium or LinkedIn and let us know what you think! If you’re into Southeast Asia, we wrote about that too (Medium or LinkedIn). We hope they’re useful insights as you target social media campaigns, forge international collaborations or plan out a tour!Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday, July 17th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Wednesday, and we’ll see you Friday! 

Vance Joy and AC/DC on Amazon Music and US Radio

2019-07-12 Listen
podcast_episode
Vance Joy , Mark Mulligan (Midia Research) , Jason Joven (Chartmetric) , AC/DC (AC/DC) , Steve Boom (Amazon Music)

Highlights  Who says music is all about young people and streaming? Amazon Music and American radio would beg to differ, and we’ll check out a couple of Australian artists who are doing well on them.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.We’re on the socials at “chartmetric”, that’s Chartmetric, no “S ”- follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, and talk to us! We’d love to hear from you.FYI, we’re scaling back to 2 episodes per week, why? Because we’re working on some special projects that we will certainly tell you about over the next few months, but we need to make the time to do them! So don’t worry, your phone isn’t playing games with your heart….it’s just us and the Backstreet Boys.Having said all that….DateThis is your Data Dump for Friday, July 12th, 2019.Vance Joy and AC/DC on Amazon Music and US RadioThe Financial Times reported yesterday on the rise of Amazon Music, and how it has experienced a 70 percent growth in subscribers in the past year.The head of Amazon Music- Steve Boom (that’s a great name for a music guy)-  noted that all the other platforms were playing for the younger crowds, but not older consumers. Apparently 14 percent of subscribers to Amazon Music are aged 55 or older, compared with just 5 percent of Spotify’s customers, according to Midia Research’s Mark Mulligan.Now on the radio side of things, Music Business Worldwide reported that AM/FM US radio consumption is growing! Take that, streaming.Radio reached more folks than any other entertainment platform in 2019, according to Nielsen’s Audio Today 2019 report.272M Americans fire up their radios each week, that is 7M more listeners than 2016...and why? Because Americans love their cars, and radios are just there.Now to help illustrate that with actual artists, we’ll turn to two of Australia’s biggest ones, relative newcomer Vance Joy and classic rock gods AC/DC.Vance Joy, the pop/folk singer-songwriter from Melbourne is currently on19 Amazon editorial playlists, including the contextual playlists Rise and Shine, Road Trip: Folk and a chart-like playlist: Best Folk Songs of 2017.His massive hit “Riptide” is actually NOT the most playlisted on the platform, it’s actually another one of his records, “Lay It On Me”, placing in 9 of those 19 Amazon Music playlists.On the 300 influential American radio stations we cover, Joy had as many as 506 spins in the week of Sept 24th 2018, and the week of July 1st, it was down to 91.But it’s all good because the state of Wisconsin LOVES Vance Joy, as his songs have been 1% of all the tracks that state’s radio stations have played since September. Pretty impressive.Now for all-time rock greats AC/DC, straight out of Sydney:They are on 14 Amazon editorial playlists, including the #2 slot on Classic Rock for Lifting, the #5 spot for Pre-Game Grilling, and the #1 spot for 80s Hard Rock Workout...who’s feeling some testosterone?AC/DC hits like “You Shook Me All Night Long” and “Back in Black” seem to resonate most in Boston, Massachusetts and Gainesville, Florida…...but what’s really good to remember is that in case your phone runs out of battery, you can find either of these artists or others by flicking on the old car radio, or simply asking Alexa to do it for you.Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday, July 12th, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Friday, and we’ll see you next week! 

Remembering Bossa Nova Great João Gilberto

2019-07-10 Listen
podcast_episode
Rutger (Chartmetric)

Highlights  Brazilian Bossa Nova legend João Gilberto died over the weekend at the age of 88. We remember “O Mito” and just how timeless he is.Mission   Good morning, it’s Rutger 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.Our social media handle is “chartmetric”, that’s Chartmetric, no “S ”- follow us on all your favorite platforms at Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, and let us know what you think about this or any episode, get the latest and greatest from us daily...we’d also love to get your feedback!DateThis is your Data Dump for Wednesday, July 10th, 2019.Remembering Bossa Nova Great João GilbertoJoão Gilberto, the father of Bossa Nova, died in Rio De Janeiro over the weekend, and we’d be remiss if we didn’t honor his monumental legacy.Gilberto was born in 1931 in the Brazilian state of Bahia, received his first guitar when he was 14, and you might say the rest is history.In 1965, he and American jazz saxophonist Stan Getz won three Grammy Awards for their album Getz/Gilberto, which features their famous recording of “The Girl From Ipanema.”With any legacy artist like Gilberto, whose catalog consists of, well, catalog (as opposed to frontline) recordings, numbers tend to flatline without those big new release marketing drivers.Gilberto’s repertoire has seen a significant uptick in interest across platforms not only in the last week, which is to be expected anytime a music great passes into the next frontier — but within the last two months as well.On Spotify, Gilberto’s follower increase has hovered steadily around a 100 since January, but since May 25, it’s shot up to around 600.While his monthly listeners fell some 5 or 600,000 from early April to early May, by the end of May, they had increased some 3 or 400,000.His Spotify Popularity Index, as a result, lifted some five points from 65 to 70 between May 23 and July 8.On every social platform, save for the Facebook wildcard, interest spikes are understandably, if unfortunately, localized around the news of his death.His Wikipedia views, for example, jumped from around 300 to nearly 70,000.There’s a similar increase on YouTube, where daily views leapt from around 66,000 to 1.2 million.Given his holy status in his home country of Brazil, Sao Paulo and Rio De Janeiro are his top cities by Spotify monthly listeners at 13.6 and 7.3 percent, respectively.On YouTube, however, Paris, France, and Santiago, Chile, are his top cities, both at around 8 percent.As far as countries go, USA, at 15 percent, is his biggest fan behind Brazil, at 17 percent of daily YouTube views.So, while Gilberto is definitely a Brazilian deity in the music world, it’s clear his impact has been global and that it will remain so for many, many years to come.Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday, July 10th, 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Wednesday, and we’ll see you on Friday!

Barbecue the Music: Playlisting USA’s Independence Day

2019-07-03 Listen
podcast_episode
Rutger (Chartmetric)

Highlights  Spotify and Apple Music are grilling up your soundtrack to one of America’s biggest holidays. So, what tracks are sparking the fireworks?Mission   Good morning, it’s Rutger 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, July 3rd, 2019.Barbecue the Music: Playlisting USA’s Independence DayWith their own Fourth of July playlists soundtracking barbecues across America, who have Apple Music and Spotify tapped to celebrate USA’s independence from Great Britain?On Apple Music’s 16-song Pop for the Fourth playlist, Rihanna’s “American Oxygen,” first released four years ago, is the latest add.Tom Petty’s “American Girl,” first released some 43 years ago, is the next most recent add, followed by Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA,” released 10 years ago now.Noticing a pattern here?Well, besides the not-so-subtle American themes, it’s a great platform for boosting those catalog numbers.Apple Music’s Pop for the Fourth playlist has five of 16 tracks at a 50-59 valence range, but seven at a 70-79 energy range. Apple Music’s 25-song Independence Day: Hip-Hop playlist follows suit, at least with the catalog trend.E-40’s “Function (featuring YG, Iamsu!, and Problem),” Raekwon’s “Soundboy Kill It (featuring Melanie Fiona and Assassin),” and Fat Joe’s “Another Day (featuring Rick Ross, French Montana, and Tiara Thomas)” comprise the most recent adds there.All of those songs were released four and five years ago, but most noteworthy here are thematics.This playlist is less about holding the banner for American exceptionalism and more about championing an independent, and even rebellious, spirit.Apple Music’s Independence Day: Hip-Hop playlist has nine of 25 tracks at a 30-39 valence range, but seven out of 25 at a 60-69 energy range.Spotify has consolidated a little of everything into a single 103-song Independence Day playlist.The latest three adds include Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street,” which was first released in 1964 ...Joey and Rory’s “This Song’s for You (featuring Zac Brown Band),” released nine years ago …And Simon and Garfunkel’s “America,” released in 1968.Talk about eclectic, with both catalog classics and country anthems mixed in with blues-rock, folk, and even the occasional Top 40 hit. Perhaps an attempt at a playlist snapshot of the American musical identity?Whatever the case, Spotify’s Independence Day playlist has 16 of 103 tracks at a 30-39 valence range, but the distribution is noticeably more equalized than with Apple Music.The most tracks, at 23, are featured in the 90-99 energy range.So, if you’re looking for high energy with a wide spread of moods, go Spotify, but if you’re looking for moderate energy and mood go Apple pop, and if you’re feeling extra independent, go Apple hip-hop -- at least just for your Fourth of July vibe.Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday, July 3rd, 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comWe’ll be off air for the holiday weekend, so happy Wednesday, happy Fourth of July, and we’ll see you on Monday!

Taylor Swift: Track Comparison Before and After Big Machine Label Group

2019-07-02 Listen
podcast_episode
Jason Joven (Chartmetric)

Highlights  “Scooter Braun's Ithaca Holdings Acquires Scott Borchetta's Big Machine Label Group” is what Sunday’s official press release reads, we’ll take a look at a sample of Swift’s data while on Big Machine and on Republic RecordsMission   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, July 2nd, 2019.Taylor Swift: Before and After Big MachineThe music business’ latest media frenzy revolves around a music mogul acquiring a top music star’s catalog.This is reminiscent of how in 1985, the late King of Pop, Michael Jackson, acquired the Beatles’ catalog of song copyrights, after receiving advice from Paul McCartney himself that music publishing was a great business to get into.Current music executive Scooter Braun and his Ithaca Holdings media company purchased Nashville-based Big Machine Label Group, Taylor Swift’s former label,  for lots of money. This was announced over the weekend.Big Machine’s assets include Swift’s catalog up through 2017’s “Reputation”.She signed to UMG’s Republic Records in 2018, and now owns her own future masters starting with the album “Lover”.While we don’t have data on the controversy, we can look at two tracks: one from Swift’s Big Machine era, and one from her Republic Records era.The former is “Look What You Made Me Do” from 2017’s “Reputation” album while the latter is the first single from the 2019 album “Lover,” “You Need to Calm Down”.Big Machine-owned “Look What You Made Me Do”...was released almost two years ago in August 2017.Currently at a 75 out of 100 Spotify Popularity Index (or SPI), it was at 91 SPI in Nov 2018.The track is on 1.6K Spotify playlists, 17 of them editorial including the This Is: Taylor Swift playlist.......while it also has a current spot on 77 Apple Music playlists and 27 Amazon playlists, all editorial for the latter case.In her Republic-era, “You Need to Calm Down”...was released just two weeks ago in June 2019.Currently at 92 SPI, it’s on less total Spotify playlists at 1.1K, but is on more editorial at 94, which makes sense since it’s relatively a brand new release.It’s on almost three times as many Apple Music playlists at 202, and 3.5x as many Amazon playlists at 98.So is it fair to say that the Republic era is “better”? Not necessarily- again, it’s just a newer track and her Big Machine track was in the middle of her 2014-2018 Spotify absence, limiting a big part of her data profile.But what this kind of side-by-side track comparison CAN do is help you evaluate how well tracks do under different promotional strategies, label teams or simply with different types of music.Hope it’s useful.Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Tuesday, July 2nd, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Tuesday, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

Enter the World of Streaming Manipulation, Part 2 - Fake Artists

2019-07-01 Listen
podcast_episode
Rutger (Chartmetric)

Highlights  On Part 1 of our streaming manipulation series, we took you on a wild ride into depths of playlist fixing. Today, on Part 2, we’re zeroing in on fake artists.Mission   Good morning, it’s Rutger 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, July 1st, 2019.Enter the World of Streaming Manipulation, Part 2 - Fake ArtistsFor Part 1 of our streaming manipulation series, we covered some funny business in the playlisting world. On Part 2, we’re scratching a different part of streaming’s underbelly: fake artist accounts.Last November, Pop Buzz and others covered a mysterious account uploading ostensibly unreleased Ariana Grande tracks under the name Zandhr.As it turned out, the tracks had been available online for some time, but that didn’t change the fact that a streaming account reportedly not linked to Ariana Grande, according to the BBC, was uploading her intellectual property to potentially profit off of.While the Zandhr account has since been taken down, our data suggests the fake artist accrued 9.5K Spotify followers and almost 30K monthly Spotify listeners, in addition to landing an “Ariana Grande - Every Song” playlist with some 20K+ followers of its own.Playboi Carti found himself in a similar predicament when three different fake accounts — Lil Kambo, Unocarti, and Unocompac — started uploading his tracks, with some pitch-shifting his songs in an attempt to disguise the illegitimate uploads.While both Lil Kambo and Unocarti’s profiles appear to have been taken down, the former amassed a 50K+ playlist reach from 37 playlists and the latter almost a 20K playlist reach from 19 playlists.Unocompac, meanwhile, appears to still have at least one Playboi Carti song up, enjoying 14K Spotify followers and a 30K playlist reach from 54 playlists.The best — or worst — part is that Unocompac’s artist gallery on Spotify includes three out-of-focus nighttime shots of a white suburban teenager posing and throwing up fake gang signs.Shaking my damn head.While this all might seem rather innocuous, as most of these accounts never amass more than a couple of thousand followers, it’s important to remember ...One, fake artist accounts effectively steal intellectual property and income from the legitimate artists they’re “impersonating.”And two, fake artist accounts devalue the work of all legitimate artists who have put their blood, sweat, and tears into making and marketing their art. While this phenomenon probably isn’t something to worry about in the short-term, how it’s handled now will determine how big of a problem it becomes in the long-term.With so many metadata errors, artist-song mismatches, and unclaimed blackbox royalties as a result, the last thing artists need is an army of mysterious impersonators gaming the system. OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Monday, July 1st, 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Monday, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

Enter the World of Streaming Manipulation, Part 1 - Fake Playlists

2019-06-28 Listen
podcast_episode
Rutger (Chartmetric) , Jason Joven (Chartmetric)

Highlights  Fake streams! Playlist manipulation! Fake artists! There’s a lot of buzz about it, but what does this look like in the 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.DateThis is your Data Dump for Friday, June 28th, 2019.Enter the World of Streaming ManipulationLast week’s streaming code of conduct was signed by more than 20 major companies across the industry to combat streaming fraud, which is good for artist compensation and more forthcoming to the fans.How can we think about this prickly topic from a music data perspective? And when we say “this”, it’s not just fake streams. It’s also playlist manipulation and fake artist accounts.For sure, we are in very murky waters, and there is little actual data on the phenomenon.Recently American indie label Hopeless Records estimated 3-4 percent of global streams could be fraudulent.But a 2015 MBW article mentions how 60% or more Twitter followers on top artist accounts could also be fake.Granted, these are different types of fraudulent behavior, but it’s also a huge delta to try to account for.What we can do though is search for red flags in the music data available to us.For example: if we look at playlist manipulation, here’s one way to look at the data to try to identify potentially iffy behavior:We scanned the playlist charts looking for abnormally high 28-day follower increases, and found a non-editorial hip-hop genre playlist with a 262% increase in followers in the past month.While that could just be great marketing, currently having 110K followers-an impressive number-its max artist monthly listeners, however, is only ~470, which doesn’t seem to match up.This means that the only artist on the playlist that gets a lot of its unique listeners from here is getting less than 1% of its supposed followers actually listening to them.Again, possible, especially since the playlist has about 100 current tracks on it, but it’s ranked in the first third of the playlist, so it’s not likely.That artist, which only has a little over 200 followers, is playlisted among high-profile artists like Eminem, Kanye West and Cardi B, presumably to draw traffic, which would be smart marketing if done legitimately, but if so many followers are not streaming the actual tracks...it smells a little fishy.If that weren’t enough, there’s a three-piece pop band with only 16 followers, and two other rap artists who have 4 and 17 Spotify followers, respectively.All three have their listed label as a series of numbers, then “Records DK” or “DK2”, which is a default label for the distributor DistroKid, if left untouched.DistroKid is one of the most popular digital distributors available to independent artists and an official partner distributor with Spotify.If that still isn’t enough, all the playlist album artwork looks like carbon copies of official Spotify playlist album art. Again, good marketing tactic...or borderline deception?So while it’s admittedly an analytical leap, it is very possible that a playlist curator is buying illegitimate playlist followers to make themselves look good, they dupe unknowing artists into thinking they are getting amazing exposure, and the curator gets paid accordingly and in our opinion, unfairly.We could be completely 100% wrong on this, but the point is, there are certain ways you can look at the music data to try to suss out what’s likely real, and what at least should raise some red flags.We’ll try to unpack some other types of illegitimate activity from a data perspective next week.Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday, June 28th, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Do you know how NPR does their ask for donations every so often? That’s what we’re about to do now! But we’re just asking for an Apple Podcasts rating.Rutger and I put at least a few hours a day into each episode, researching, writing, editing, recording, editing again, publishing to multiple platforms, checking analytics...and it’d be really cool for us to get some feedback on how we’re doing: the good/bad/ugly. So it’d only takes a few thumb swipes out of your day, and you’d be sending us so much joy: we’d appreciate it.As always, free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Friday, have a great weekend, and see you on Monday!

Tour, Catalog, and Marketing in Southeast Asia's Trigger Cities

2019-06-27 Listen
podcast_episode
Rutger (Chartmetric)

HighlightsFollow us down to the trigger cities of Southeast Asia where their Shazam, Spotify, and YouTube charts have some big implications for tour strategy and catalog exploitation.Mission   Good morning, it’s Rutger 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 Thursday, June 27th, 2019.Trigger Cities in Southeast Asia On our blog this week, Jason did an epic analysis of Southeast Asia’s trigger cities, revealing what implications their Shazam, Spotify, and YouTube charts have for tour strategy and catalog exploitation.We’re just scratching the surface of it here.First, Shazam. From Singapore’s 41 pop genre tags to Jakarta’s 40 to Kuala Lumpur’s 37 down to Bangkok’s 30, an overwhelming Southeast Asian love of pop music in the past month would be an understatement.However, the region doesn’t appear to care much about querying hip-hop or rap, as the genre only makes a 10th place appearance in Jakarta.On Spotify, K-pop group BLACKPINK is currently the hottest act throughout the region, having 2.11M monthly listeners in the past month.Our good friend Lauv (remember him from our June 3 episode?) slides into #2 with 2.10M monthly listeners.With the exception of BLACKPINK, all other artists have US or UK origins.Given Spotify’s northern European origins and that its most popular artists are also of Western origin, this makes sense.Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, however, seems to exist in its own silo. More commonly known as Saigon, locals prefer Korean acts, sharing a love of K-pop boy band SEVENTEEN with Bangkok.But the city’s #1 most listened-to artist on Spotify is their “queen of V-pop,” Mỹ Tâm. An outlier here, however, is Ho Chi Minh City’s third most listened to artist on Spotify: Nashville’s Landon Austin.Austin’s covers are apparently catnip for Southeast Asia’s love of non-controversial pop, because his top five cities by Spotify monthly listeners are all in Southeast Asia.Should Austin be touring the region like a madman, then?Based on the available data, it sure looks like it, but we can’t rule out the possibility of bots and bought streams — for which a lot more research still has to be done.On YouTube, BLACKPINK and BTS, two of Korea’s biggest international acts, consistently appear in the top 10 artists by YouTube daily video views.Aggregating the top 10 artists of each of the six Southeast Asian cities for YouTube daily views, the #6 most viewed artist is Brad Kane. If you missed our May 16 podcast episode on Quezon City, Kane was the titular character’s original singing voice for the 1992 Disney animated film Aladdin, which has just been re-released as a live action film starring Will Smith.The fact that the New York City actor, singer, and producer’s rendition of “A Whole New World” has stirred up so much engagement 27 years later in Southeast Asia says something about how locals consume music … not necessarily to support the artist, but for their own karaoke endeavors!So, if you’re looking to exploit catalog records, this might be the perfect spot.But don’t count out domestic artists.Three Southeast Asian artists make the region’s top 10 most viewed: Bangkok trap rapper YOUNGOHM (at #4 with 1.1M daily views), Indonesian singer Nella Kharisma (at #7 with 637K daily views), and Bangkok punk rock band Labanoon (at #9 with 589K daily views).One distinct takeaway with these domestic artists is that their YouTube support comes exclusively from their home countries. Since all three are proudly delivering content in their mother tongues, they are likely limiting their global market appeal, but it’s also why they resonate so well with their fellow country people.As Jason puts it, looking at a certain market’s music data raises our awareness about who the fans are, what their specific cultural histories have been, and how they are now living as a reflection of it.  Well said, but something to consider beyond the computer screen is the fact that digital behavior doesn’t always correspond directly to behavior in the real world.Which is why, before you completely tailor your tour or marketing strategy to your streaming data, make sure you’ve considered all avenues of information.Spotify numbers don’t always translate to ticket sales.OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Thursday, June 27th, 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.If you want to read Jason’s piece in full and look at some pretty charts, it’s up on our blog at blog.chartmetric.io.Free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.Happy Thursday, and see you tomorrow!

2019 Women’s World Cup: USWNT Carli Lloyd’s and Alex Morgan’s Playlists!

2019-06-26 Listen
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Jason Joven (Chartmetric) , Carli Lloyd (United States Women's National Team) , Alex Morgan (United States Women's National Team)

HighlightsSoccer fans unite: the 2019 Women’s World Cup has been happening in France all month, but what are U.S. team’s biggest stars listening to as they head into the quarterfinals?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 Wednesday, June 26, 2019.Playlisting the Women’s World CupThe World Cup defending champions, the United States, are scheduled to play host nation France in the quarterfinals on Friday, June 28th.The U.S. squad won the last World Cup in 2015 for the third consecutive time in Canada, and are favored to win this year as well, and that’s large in part due to a couple of the team’s biggest stars: two-time US Soccer Player of the Year Alex Morgan and two-time FIFA Player of the Year Carli Lloyd.And guess what? They have playlists!Hailing from Southern California, Co-Captain Alex Morgan has a co-branded “Alex Morgan | Workout Playlist” with Beats by Dr. Dre as the listed curator.The American striker currently has 12 tracks on the list, with mostly mellow and moody pop selections including Maggie Rogers, Hozier, and José González.The playlist’s sonic characteristics are not what you would expect: they are less energetic and more mid-tempo, acoustic jams.The Energy ratings for the songs, which run from 0 to 100, are only moderately high, mostly lying in the 30 to 80 range with tracks from Lauren Daigle and George Ezra.The Acousticness ratings are quite well-distributed from 10 to 90, meaning Morgan seems to appreciate acoustic guitars as much as electronic beats.And dare we say that Morgan likes getting moody with her Beats earbuds on, with one-third of the playlist in the 20-30 Valence range, which measures positive emotional sentiment. Some of these darker vibes come from artists Vera Blue and Leon Bridges.Now hailing from New Jersey, fellow Co-Captain Carli Lloyd’s “Metabolic Kick Mix playlist”, which is curated under the NikeWomen curator profile, is all about that high energy.Currently an attacking midfielder on the US squad, her Spotify playlist has 12 tracks and over 800 followers, featuring amped-up pop and rock records from Maroon 5, Imagine Dragons, and Ellie Goulding.Lloyd’s playlist tends towards the electronic side of things and with more emotionally uplifting sentiment:Her tracks rate high on Energy and Beats Per Minute, with seven tracks in the 90-100 Energy range and eight tracks in the 130-140 BPM range, to include Hardwell and a OneRepublic remix.As for Acousticness, Lloyd is not about it! She likes the electronic beats, most tracks in the low 10-20 acousticness range.But for Valence, she likes getting into the darker vibes as well, with most tracks in the 40 to 60 range, including a Betty Who banger and the sole acoustic track from John Mayer, which is positioned last in the playlist, and likely great for a workout cool-down and stretch.So, if you’re looking to sweat with some of America’s top athletes putting it all on the line this week, look no further.OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday, June 26, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.Happy Wednesday, see you tomorrow!

The Data Behind the BET Awards

2019-06-25 Listen
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HighlightsSunday’s BET Awards had winners, losers, and everything in between. Here’s the data behind the biggest moments. Mission   Good morning, it’s Rutger 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 25, 2019.The Data Behind the BET AwardsNow that the dust has settled from Sunday’s BET Awards, let’s look at the data behind the ceremony’s bright spots.One of the evening’s most special moments happened when the award for Best Male Hip-Hop Artist went to Nipsey Hussle, who died tragically on March 31 in Los Angeles. The rapper also received the Humanitarian Award, which his grandmother graciously accepted.While Nipsey’s star was already on the rise before the tragedy, immediately following the news of his death, fans undeniably pushed his work onto the world stage, bumping him from an estimated 2.2 million monthly Spotify listeners to an April 26 peak of an estimated 11.8 million monthly Spotify listeners.His posthumous feature with John Legend on DJ Khaled’s “Higher” continues to make its presence known on Apple Music’s African and Caribbean Top 100 playlists, in addition to Hip-Hop A-List playlists as well.Speaking of, this year’s Best International Act Award went to Nigeria’s Burna Boy and the Best New International Act Award went to South Africa’s Sho Madjozi.Burna Boy is currently on 21 Best of the Week Apple Music playlists around the world, and he also finds himself at the top of Spotify’s Hot Hits UK, African Heat, and Afro Hits playlists.Sho Madjozi, meanwhile, only finds herself on four editorial playlists on Spotify but on six Best of the Week Apple Music playlists throughout Africa and a number of Top 100 Apple Music playlists in various African countries.While she’s largely regional now, Madjozi’s BET recognition indicates a growing potential for overseas visibility.Now, can we talk about how much Mary J. Blige and Lizzo owned the stage?Blige is a living R&B/hip-hop legend, and her performance on and off that stage proved it.Instead of losing followers and listeners as her music ages, she continues to gain them.In 2016, Blige’s followers sat just under 500K, but today, she’s at an estimated 1.9 million on Spotify.While the change hasn’t been quite as drastic for her monthly listenership, her shrinking listener to follower ratio and her growing follower conversion (she’s gaining at least 1K Spotify followers daily) indicates she’s still got it.Her YouTube views bolster this point by sporting a strong “weekend bump” every Friday through Sunday, suggesting people still party down with the queen of hip-hop soul.Lizzo meanwhile, can apparently twerk and play the flute all at once, but she’s got a ways to go when it comes to follower conversion.Unlike Blige’s 3:1 listener to follower ratio, which makes sense given the longevity of her career, Lizzo’s is at 36:1, meaning 17.5 million people might be listening to her a month on Spotify, but if she wants Blige’s longevity, her 500K followers are going to have to start snowballing to catch up.A high ratio for an emerging artist is usually a promising sign, however, so Lizzo has plenty to look forward to.All numbers and names aside, the real winner here was the awards ceremony itself.  OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Tuesday, June 25, 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.Happy Tuesday, see you tomorrow!

New Music Friday Monday: the Royal Rise of King Princess

2019-06-24 Listen
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Rutger (Chartmetric) , King Princess

HighlightsIn just over a year, King Princess has gone from 10 Spotify playlists to more than 1,000 and 5,000 Twitter followers to more than 100,000. Now, they’re on Mark Ronson’s new track, “Pieces of Us.”Mission   Good morning, it’s Rutger 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, June 24, 2019.New Music Friday Monday: the Royal Rise of King PrincessIn just a year, King Princess has gone from a humble 10 Spotify playlists to a star-powered 1K, and 5K Twitter followers to 100K+. The 20-year-old, New York City-born singer-songwriter/producer now finds themselves on Mark Ronson’s June 17 release, “Pieces of Us,” which currently sits at the No. 5 spot on Spotify’s New Music Friday playlist. How’d they get there so quickly?Using the Analyze function on their artist page to compare their Spotify playlist evolution with their social follows, we can chart it.On March 9, 2018, King Princess had just under 5K Twitter followers and was only on 10 Spotify playlists.That’s great for a young indie artist, but clearly not on par with the metrics typical Mark Ronson collaborators (who include Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga, Adele, Miley Cyrus, and Amy Winehouse) usually boast. By June 21, 2018, King Princess got closer with almost 30K Twitter followers and 237 Spotify playlists.Mind you, that exponential jump was in a matter of just three measly months.Fast forward to March 9, 2019, and King Princess hit just a bit more than 92K Twitter followers, 374K Instagram followers, and was on 1,000 Spotify playlists.By then, they had also been booked to play this year’s Coachella, Lollapalooza, and Governors Ball festivals.                                                                                   Today, the alternative pop star has some 111K Twitter followers, 450K+ Instagram followers, about 25K Facebook fans, and sits on more than 1K Spotify playlists.In less than a year and a half, King Princess’ Spotify Popularity Index went from 0 to 75 out of 100.But it’s not all out of thin air.In February 2017, they became the first artist to sign to Mark Ronson’s Zelig Recordings, which is a Columbia Records imprint ultimately owned by Sony.It’s only natural for them to be featured on Mark Ronson’s “Pieces of Us,” which was released on June 17, and currently sits in the No. 5 spot on Spotify’s New Music Friday playlist.You might say, with a little help from Ronson, King Princess’ royal rise was written in the stars all along.OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Monday, June 24, 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at app.chartmetric.com/signupAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.Happy Monday, see you tomorrow!

A2IM Indie Week, Day 4: Beggars Group and Kill Rock Stars

2019-06-21 Listen
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Martin Mills (Beggars Group) , Jason Joven (Chartmetric) , Portia Sabin (Kill Rock Stars)

HighlightsFollowing a panel including Beggars Group’s Martin Mills and Kill Rock Star’s Portia Sabin, we’re looking at artists on their rosters and asking, “What makes them two of indie music’s longest lasting labels?”  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 Friday, June 21, 2019.A2IM Indie Week, Day 4Several Indie icons closed out A2IM’s Indie Week in New York City yesterday, two of them being the legendary Martin Mills and Dr. Portia Sabin sharing what’s helped them make Beggars Group and Kill Rock Stars, respectively, some of indie music’s longest lasting labels. Beggars Group is the parent company of 4AD, Rough Trade Records, Matador, XL Recordings and Young Turks.Mills started it in London in 1977, and his many labels have gone on to sign everyone from Adele to Radiohead.While Adele hasn’t released anything for some time, her 25 album, which released physically in November 2015 and digitally in June 2016 via a joint deal between XL Recordings and Sony’s Columbia, “single-handedly revived global album sales”, according to the Guardian.The album’s streaming success is no joke either, as it’s maintained a 70-80 Spotify Popularity Index score over the last three years, and has been included on upwards of 12.5K Spotify playlists.That kind of success under XL’s guidance gave Adele the leverage to be able to sign an enormous and unprecedented £90 million deal with Sony in May 2016.No doubt the industry will be keen to check her next album from one of the industry’s biggest major labels.Now entering the underground, since 2006, Sabin has run Pacific Northwest-based indie label Kill Rock Stars, which has been a home to riot grrrl legends Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, the late singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, and folk rockers the Decemberists.Sabin’s roster is more niche than Mills’, but Kill Rock Stars’ ability to navigate catalog digitization and promotion has allowed their artists to prosper.Smith, for instance, maintains some 1.4M monthly listeners on Spotify, despite the fact that he passed away tragically in 2003. In March 2017, Kill Rock Stars released an expanded edition of his 1997 album Either/Or, which helped increase Smith’s Spotify followers by around 70 percent to 430K and spiked his monthly listenership by an estimated 250K. Whether by keen artist development or catalog revitalization, Beggars Group and Kill Rock Stars have each found a way to not only survive longer than most indie labels, but to also thrive while doing so.OutroThat’s it for Indie Week and your Daily Data Dump for Friday, June 21, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Friday, and have a great weekend!

A2IM Indie Week, Day 3: Reeperbahn Festival

2019-06-20 Listen
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Gurr , Rutger (Chartmetric) , Yes We Mystic , Leoniden , Renata Zeiguer (Renata Zeiguer) , Mira Lu Kovacs , ORI , Surfbort (Surfbort)

2019-06-20 // A2IM Indie Week, Day 3: Reeperbahn Festival HighlightsHamburg’s Reeperbahn Festival is presenting seven different acts on Day 3 of A2IM’s Indie Week, and we will check out how they’re doing in the data world.Mission    Good morning, it’s Rutger 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 Thursday, June 20, 2019.A2IM Indie Week, Day 3At the corner of Allen and Houston on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, NYC, last night, six bands shared their live music as an official part of A2IM’s Indie Week: the Reeperbahn Festival, New York Edition.Based around the entertainment and red-light district in Hamburg, Germany, since 2006, the Reeperbahn Festival will be putting on more than 900 events in the area this September with international artists of all genres, in addition to a conference for music and related industry professionals.  In the 07:30-08:00pm slot was Winnipeg, Canada’s Yes We Mystic, with their melodic and experimental indie rock sound.With 7K Spotify monthly listeners and their top four listener cities being Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver and Montreal, they have obviously created a stir in their home country very effectively.Half of their 2.2K Instagram followers are from their hometown of Winnipeg, so Reeperbahn has done a lovely job of finding a truly homegrown act and bringing them to a bigger stage.Jerusalem-born singer-songwriter-producer ORI graced the stage in the 8:05-8:35pm slot. Using original looping samples of his own voice and instrumentation, he’s got over 10K monthly listeners and his 2017 single “Black Book” is currently on the The Austin 100 playlist from NPR Music and the official SXSW 2019 playlist, where he played two official sets this past March.His current Spotify Popularity Index may only be at 28 for now, but his work has also been sampled by Kendrick Lamar and Jay Rock.Closing out the night in the 11:20-midnight slot was Surfbort, most likely because they are a hard act to follow with their hottest tracks titled “Hippoe Vomit Inhaler”, “Pretty little fucker” and “Dicks”.The Brooklyn-based punk outfit is named after a Beyoncé lyric and is just under 20K monthly listeners and is featured on Green Day’s “Oakland Coffee” playlist as well as the official SXSW 2019 playlist, as they also played a set in Austin last spring.In other slots were Germany’s Leoniden and Gurr, Austria’s Mira Lu Kovacs, and America’s Renata Zeiguer (US), but check them out...if Hamburg’s Reeperbahn NY Edition picked them, they’re sure to be worth the listen and maybe your latest favorite sound.OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Thursday, June 20, 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.Happy Thursday, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

A2IM Indie Week, Day 2: Spotify’s Indie Curators

2019-06-19 Listen
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2019-06-19 // A2IM Indie Week, Day 2: Spotify’s Indie Curators HighlightsSpotify and major label curators always move the needle, but with Day 2 of A2IM’s Indie Week in the bag, we’re looking at important indies of the bunch.Mission    Good morning, it’s Rutger 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, June 19, 2019.A2IM Indie Week, Day 2With Day 2 of A2IM’s Indie Week in the bag, we’re looking at important indie curators moving the needle on Spotify.Way up at the top is PopFiltr, with nearly 5 million playlist followers across 13 playlists.Boasting a 13 percent follower growth rate over the last 28-day period, PopFiltr has plenty to brag about, and artists or labels can submit their songs for consideration at popfiltr.com. Indiemono is another hidden gem, with 2.2 million playlist followers across a jaw-dropping 252 playlists, which a little something for everyone.In the last 28 days, Indiemono experienced a 3 percent follower growth rate, and they also offer an easy song submission process at indiemono.com.There’s also the indie indies, or the individual curators who are so good at what they do, they continue to kill it flying solo. Take Ignatious Pop, for example, whose 451 playlists have just over 2 million followers and a 4 percent growth rate in the last 28 days.Or Jesuss Vargas Gonzalez, whose 93 playlists have 1.5 million followers and an 11 percent growth rate in the last 28 days.Landing their playlists is probably going to be a bit harder, as they’re less about submissions and more about discoveries.Also keep an eye on up-and-comers Playlist Pop, with a 71 percent growth rate…. Independent Hits, with a 539 percent growth rate, meaning they’re probably new and growing really fast….And ambitious LA-based indie label and playlist network Plvylists (who’ve swapped out the “A” for a “V”), with a 125 percent growth rate.The more that major streaming platforms corral the radio market, the more important curators will become as promoters of what’s hot, what’s new, and what’s never been heard.OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday, June 19, 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.Happy Wednesday, and we’ll see you tomorrow from Indie Week!

On the Road: A2IM Indie Week, Day 1

2019-06-18 Listen
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Jason Joven (Chartmetric)

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.

New Music Friday Monday: Fresh Indie on Amazon (Khruangbin, Julien Baker, Vagabon)

2019-06-17 Listen
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Vagabon (Nonesuch Records) , Jason Joven (Chartmetric) , Khruangbin (Dead Oceans) , Julien Baker (Matador Records)

HighlightsWe’re on the road! We’re at A2IM’s Indie Week in New York City and so we’ll publish our music data-related thoughts and experiences for you starting in tomorrow’s episode in case you can’t make it.But for today, we’ll celebrate the indie community on Amazon Music with an indie-focused New Music Friday Monday!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 Monday, June 17, 2019.New Music Friday Monday: Fresh Indie on AmazonHopping over to the “Fresh Indie” playlist on Amazon Music, we’ve got no less than 60 tracks of the most brand spanking new independent music in the streaming world.The tracks all come from over 35 different indie labels to include 4AD, ATO Records and XL recordings.Over 64% of the artists featured are from the US, 16% from the UK, and then Canada/Norway/Australia/New Zealand making up the rest of the Anglo-focused playlist.Just under half of the list has either the indiepop, folk-pop or indietronica genre tag attached to it, with 15+ other genre tags thrown in to make for a diverse-sounding set.In the #4 position is the funk-addled “Mary Always” instrumental track by Houston-born band Khruangbin, mixing soul, dub, psychedelia, and Thai funk.The track is currently on nine Spotify editorial playlists including All New Indie w/ 958K followers and 2 Apple editorial playlists including Today’s Indie Rock.The great playlist promotion is coming out of Bloomington, Indiana, where the track’s Dead Oceans label is housed with the Secretly Group, an umbrella of indie labels putting out rock music of different flavors.In the #9 spot is the spacious, introspective track “Conversation Piece” by Memphis, Tennessee’s Julien Baker.Currently on no Spotify editorial playlists and 1 Apple editorial playlist, the Late Night Menu, the Matador Records release is the latest from the singer-songwriter known for heart-wrenching lyricism and melody.What’s uber cool about Baker is that she is also part of supergroup boygenius, also under Matador, with Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, kind of following the K-pop model of supergroup splitting off into solo careers, but just the reverse, as boygenius formed in 2018 and each member had solo careers as early as 2014. Last but not least is “Flood Hands” by Vagabon, coming from Nonesuch Records.Vagabon is in the #12 slot on the Amazon playlist, currently on 3 Spotify editorial playlists, also including All New Indie with Khruangbin and 2 Apple editorial playlists, also including Today’s Indie Rock.Released on June 13, it’s the latest from the Cameroon-born multi-instrumentalist now based in NYC...where we are this week for A2IM’s Indie Week!OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Monday, June 17, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Monday, we’ll see you tomorrow from NYC’s Indie Week floor! Bye.