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HighlightsAmazon Music’s Top 100 Country chart features a wide selection of artists, but their long time on chart suggests a wider platform trend towards stagnancy in several genresMission   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 May 10th 2019.Amazon Music: Top 100 Songs - CountryOn the Amazon Music Top Songs Country chart yesterday, Lil Nas X took the #1 spot with the Billy Ray Cyrus collaboration “Old Town Road”, spending 30 days there so far. North Carolina’s Luke Combs took the #2 spot with the ballad “Crazy Beautiful”, only its second day on the chart, despite being released a year ago.And the heartbroken lyrics of “Whiskey Glasses” kept its current chart peak at #3 from Tennessee’s Morgan Wallen, after living on the chart for 69 days.The Top 100 tracks on the chart feature several artists with a handful records among them: for example, Jason Aldean, Thomas Rhett, Dan + Shay, Florida Georgia Line and Kane Brown all have four tracks charting, while Luke Combs, Maren Morris, Brett Young, Luke Byran and Chris Stapleton all have three.Label-wise, the Top 100 also are well-distributed, with Columbia Nashville taking 10 of the tracks, Capitol Records Nashville with 9, and Warner Bros., Broken Bow and RCA Records Nashville all taking 8 tracks each.Time on Chart & the Alexa-Genre ComplexIn terms of time on chart, the Amazon Top Country 100 is fairly stagnant: 86 of the tracks have been there for at least one month, with 22 of them there for a year and a half! That’s nearly a quarter of a Top 100 chart not changing, and a sign of what I’ll playfully call for now the Alexa-Genre Complex.For one of America’s most popular and productive genres, this is fairly bad news for any emerging country artists that are fighting to squeeze into the Alexa-driven platform, while obviously great news for the few top artists benefitting from a stagnant chart.If we take a look at a few other Amazon genres, this chart behavior is surprisingly consistent: the Dance/Electronic genre features 87 tracks in its Top 100 that have charted for more than a month with 26 for more than 1.5 years, while 86 records in Rap & Hip Hop charted for a month plus, with 25 for more than 1.5 years.The Pop genre also follows suit with 85 tracks for more than a month and 20 for more than 1.5 years.It’s almost clockwork how predictable the charts are irrelevant of the genre, and likely says something about Amazon algorithmic behavior rather than each audience’s listening preferences, which would presumably show some sort of differentiation.When aggregating all the genres however, the trend somewhat weakens, with only 71 of the top tracks being 1-month plus, which suggests that this trend might be coded just for genre, and is a cascading effect from genre-focused playlisting. This would make sense given that when Alexa is engaged, user utterances would likely be something like “Alexa, play some country music” or something similar and giving those top artists more stream time. (sorry if I just triggered your Alexa)Another interesting takeaway is how most of the 1.5-year plus tracks stack towards the top third of the chart, and almost exclusively in the Top 50, meaning that the bottom half of the Amazon charts tends to be more fluid. So if you’re an emerging artist, expect your success on Amazon Music to be mostly all in or virtually nothing, and if you’re the small population getting lukewarm play, maybe it’s time to make some calls to push that track into that coveted upper Alexa stratosphere.OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday May 10th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at app.chartmetric.com/signupAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.Happy Friday, have a great weekend!

HighlightsCountry tops yesterday’s Amazon Music Top 100 Songs chartPost Malone and Swae Lee’s “Sunflower” continues to grow into everyone’s earsMissionGood 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 Thursday April 18th 2019.Chart SpotlightYesterday’s Amazon Music Top Songs chart was ruled by country, as the top 100 tracks on the Alexa-driven platform featured 26 country genre tags.Pop came in 2nd place with 23 tags, and rap & hip-hop came in 3rd with 16.Billie Eilish continues her chart domination with having the most tracks with a total of eight, ranging from positions #12-90.Seven of them are from her latest album, released on April 1st.As for the top 100 songs and how long they’ve spent on the chart, it’s starting to reflect a nature similar to the Spotify Top 200, in that the majority of the tracks linger on for at least 1-6 months, though not more than 6 months like the Swedish platform this week.Only 10 of the Amazon chart tracks are within a week old, with the newest entry only being 2 days old, and that’s from American singer-songwriter Khalid and his chilled out track “Talk” off his album Free Spirit, released on April 5th.Tracking back to country’s run on yesterday’s chart, leading in the #1 and #3 position is Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”, with the original version leading the remix with Billy Ray Cyrus. Amazon categorizes these tracks as country, differing from Billboard’s initial opinion of the track.Brett Young and Maren Morris are in the #13 and #14 spots, while HARDY and Brett Young (with another track this time) bring up the rear in the #99 and #100 positions.Track SpotlightNow in the #2 spot yesterday, is a track that just won’t go away: “Sunflower” by Post Malone and Swae Lee.The dreamy, 2.5-minute track juxtaposing a strained relationship with a sunflower has over 671M spins on Spotify, with a track popularity score of 98 out of 100.It’s also the most played song off the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse original soundtrack on Spotify, the track releasing in October of last year, two months before the entire album and animated film released in December.It’s no secret that a killer track combined with a hugely popular movie is a magic formula. One only has to point to Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth’s “See You Again” off the Fast & Furious 7 OST to remember how viral a movie track can get.With a 97% Rotten Tomatoes score, $375M worldwide gross box office, and endless of positive comments across social media, Post Malone and Swae Lee seem to have really struck gold.The soundtrack itself was reportedly curated to sound like what the film’s teen Spiderman, Miles Morales, listens to.“Sunflower” is currently on 93 Spotify editorial playlists and 38 Apple Music editorial lists, but interestingly, the track isn’t on many high profile ones.While it is on Spotify’s Global Top 50, the next most followed playlist is the personalized Mood Booster with 3.2M followers, which due to the playlist’s track randomization, the track itself might not even show up.As for Apple Music, it’s only on one Today’s Hits playlist in China and two A-List playlists in Norway and Canada, also not much of a promotional push.Not to discount the track itself, but the fact that the track is enjoying its sixth month of popularity without the support of editorial playlists suggests the importance of listeners associating a song with another piece of pop culture outside of the music industry.As Post Malone is certainly no stranger to massively successful hits, the fact that “Sunflower” is his fifth most popular music video with 500M YouTube views says that a killer track + a killer movie =  a winning combination.OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Thursday April 18th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at app.chartmetric.com/signupAnd article links and show notes are at a new website: podcast.chartmetric.com.Happy Thursday, see you tomorrow!