We're launching something new: stories from our blog … in audio format. We’ll still be bringing you our conversations with music industry professionals every month, but between those conversations, we’ll be sprinkling in important music data stories from our blog that you might have missed or haven’t had the time to sit down and read. This week, we're diving into Data Scientist Josh Hayes’ comparative analysis of major label vs. non-major label chart performance around the world: https://blog.chartmetric.com/state-of-the-industry-major-label-vs-non-major-label-performance-across-regions/ Follow along with Josh's original piece, which is full of pretty charts and graphs, and subscribe to our blog for more. How Music Charts is a podcast by Chartmetric that explores the dance between interpreting data and making creative decisions in the music business every day.

HighlightsWhat does an emerging Atlanta rapper and a British TV series soundtrack have to do with each other? Let our A&R Prediction tool explain.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.The SXSW 2020 schedule was just announced yesterday, and Chartmetric is officially hosting two panels: one on Trigger Cities in the Creating & Monetizing Music track and another on Music Data for Engineers & Data Scientists for the Future of Music track. We’ll see you there.Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at chartmetric, one word, no “s”.DateThis is your Data Dump for Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2019.Making Growth Predictions With Our New A&R ToolsOn October 9th, one of Chartmetric’s Data Scientists, Josh Hayes, wrote on our blog about the new A&R Prediction capabilities we now have live on the app, and now it’s time to dig into it!We currently have a menu of algorithms that create shortlists of talent that we expect to grow in the next week.We trained a model based on thousands of success-patterns taken from 1.7 million artists over the past 3 years, including album releases, monthly listeners, followers, and Spotify Popularity Index.One of the algorithms predicts who will reach a Spotify Popularity Index (or SPI) of 35 in the next week. If you’re not familiar with SPI, essentially Spotify internally ranks the popularity of all artists on their platform daily, and puts them on a 100-point scale according to their own metrics, which we also track.Coming in #1 yesterday was Atlanta rapper Benjamin Ken who is currently at 23 SPI and grew from 7.5K followers in mid-July to 11.8K followers now.The biggest spike for Ken seems to be his monthly listeners, which was in the 300s only last Wednesday, and spiked up to 12.5K as of Monday.The interesting part is Ken was not added to any new Spotify playlists since August 22nd, and hasn’t released any new music on the platform since his CHOSEN EP in July 2019...so this looks like a case in which the stimulus of increased Spotify traction has nothing to do with Spotify, it only acting as a repository for increased attention from another source, which for now, requires more digging.Another algorithm we have in the A&R Prediction tool looks at who will break a Spotify Popularity Index of 30 in the next week, which is digging deeper into the level of complexity and confidence on whether they’ll actually hit that benchmark...but hey as long as it’s good music, who cares?Yesterday’s winner was London rock outfit Eyes on Film at 25 SPI and a rather flat follower growth going from the 200s in 2017 to only the 500s this week.Despite the low follower growth, Eyes on Film went from just under 8K monthly listeners at the end of July to breaking 21K this week, growing over 50% in the past month alone.What’s going on here? Yet another TV sync success story...in this case, the award-winning, BBC-produced, and Netflix-acquired series Peaky Blinders, starring Cillian Murphy.The Eyes on Film track “Waking Up Dead” was released back in 2013, but it is also included in two Peaky Blinder-oriented playlists with 288K and 108K followers each.With the fifth season of the series releasing on BBC One in August, coinciding with Eyes on Film’s also spiking up in...you guessed it, August...we now have our method behind the madness.There’s more for us to explore together on the A&R Prediction tool later, but for now, we hope you check it out for yourself!Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are available at chartmetric.com And article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Wednesday, we’ll see you Friday! 

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!

HighlightsSpecial interview episode today: Does data science scare you? Does it keep you up at night when you hear or read about it at a panel or on some podcast, and you think to yourself, “I have no idea what they are talking about.”Rest easy and let Chartmetric’s Resident Data Scientist assuage your fears.How do you measure artist success across multiple streaming, social and other Internets platforms? We might have something for you.Mission   Good morning, it’s Jason and Josh here at Chartmetric usually 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 12th, 2019.Interview OutlineWhat is Cross-Platform Performance scoring and ranking on Chartmetric?Josh’s blog article / CPP explanationCPP measurementsStage: This is the amount of “reach” or “exposure” that an artist has over audiences. The bigger the stage, the more people actively listening, watching, or consuming what the artist is creating.Followers: This is the size of an artist’s “fanbase” or an artist’s “stickiness” with audiences. Followers have opted into tracking an artist and therefore are more likely to re-engage with the artist’s products in the future. Followers are not actively engaging with an artist all the time, but artists have an easier job of connecting with followers than non-followers.Cool CPP video to visualize the data science (made by Graphic & Motion Design Artist Anastasiya Bulavkina)Philosophical debate: what is “best” nowadays?Is there a way for people to reach out to you on the Interwebs, Josh?Josh’s LinkedIn profilehi (at) chartmetric (dot) comOutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday, June 12th, 2019. This is Josh and Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at app.chartmetric.com/signupAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Wednesday, see you tomorrow!