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2019-09-20 // Taylor Swift enjoys Chinese success on QQ Music, with R3HAB set to in the near future with Tencent Highlights  If the 2000s belonged to 50 Cent, the future belongs to Tencent. We’ll check out a few Western artists who are active in the Chinese market, and how the tech conglomerate may matter to them in the near future.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.Chartmetric’s social media handle is Chartmetric, no “S ”- follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook- we’re always posting fun music facts, we’d love to hear from you!DateThis is your Data Dump for Friday, Sept. 20, 2019.Taylor Swift enjoys Chinese success on QQ Music, with R3HAB set to in the near futureMusic Business Worldwide yesterday reported on Tencent, the giant Chinese tech company responsible for running the massively popular WeChat messaging platform with over 1B users and related music streaming app QQ Music, with over 650M active monthly users. One piece highlighted how Tencent is reportedly in talks to buy 10 to 20% of Universal Music Group, in a move that would surely be a boon for all artists operating with the major label.Some already there don’t need it! Looking at the QQ Music Western chart for this week, one of their artists under the Republic Records imprint is already enjoying her access to Chinese music fans, an artist by the name of Taylor Swift.While Tay Tay isn’t in the Top 20 this week, she does have by far the most tracks on the 100 track chart, placing 17 tracks of her recent Lover album onto the list.This obviously suggests that her entire album is getting quite an amount of attention on the platform, rather than just a few hits like Camila Cabello at 3 tracks or Ed Sheeran at 2.She’s not the only artist with new album release doing well there however, as Post Malone placed seven of his 17-track album Hollywood’s Bleeding in the QQ Western Top 100 and showing that Chinese fans are into trap just as much as pop music.Someone who doesn’t show up on the QQ Chart this week but may be doing so very soon is Dutch-Moroccan DJ/producer R3HAB, who just signed to Tencent’s joint venture label with Sony, named Liquid State.The Hong-Kong based electronic-focused label must be excited to host the international artist’s content in the Chinese market, as he’s played at least five live shows on the mainland this year, the last three being in Shanghai, Harbin and Chengdu, according to Songkick data.R3HAB’s exposure on Spotify and YouTube has been mostly European, getting most of his streams from cities like Amsterdam, Oslo, Warsaw and Paris, but the electronic sound does indeed lend itself to a global audience, just like Liquid State “ambassador” Alan Walker can attest to.The British-Norwegian DJ has an almost 35% Instagram follower demographic from Asia, over 30% of them hailing from Indonesia and India alone and accounting for over 2M followers in those markets.So with Liquid State and Tencent now in his corner, it looks like R3HAB could very well start exhibiting Taylor Swift-like success there, because with over 83% of the Chinese music market controlled by Tencent, the promotional advantages will be plenty.Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday, Sept. 20, 2019. This is Jason 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!

Highlights  When was the last time you got your face melted with some heavy metal? Well, distributor TuneCore says it was probably during 2018 and American alt-metal group Tool says it’s right now on the Billboard 200 chart.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.Chartmetric’s social media handle is Chartmetric, no “S ”- follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook- we’re always posting cool music tidbits for your knowledge! And here’s more.DateThis is your Data Dump for Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2019.Tool, Metal’s Growth, and the Future of the AlbumYesterday, digital distributor TuneCore released some Q1 2019 statistics stating that $83M USD was earned by its artists, bringing their total distribution revenue to over $1.5B all-time.However, one of its finer details caught the eye of some music outlets like Consequence of Sound: the Heavy metal genre sported a 154% increase in streams and downloads in 2018, outdoing the next four genres J-Pop at a 133%, R&B/Soul at 68% and K-Pop at 58%.While the 2018 data might feel a little outdated, how about this week of September 14th, when American alternative metal band Tool debuted in the #1 Billboard 200 album chart like they were a Billie Eilish / Drake super-group. Tool’s new album “Fear Inoculum” breaks all of the pop and hip-hop’s rules, as it was 13 years in the making for the progressive metal act and according to Billboard:“...a now-rare example of a No. 1 album without…” a concert redemption offer, pre-order promotion, or merchandise bundle.Tool amazingly relegated Taylor Swift’s “Lover” album to the #2 slot on the Billboard chart, and the band is currently ranked 679th overall according to Chartmetric’s Cross-Platform Performance ranking as of yesterday.Tool’s Neighboring Artists who are ranked similarly include Reggaeton artist Arcangel, Pop crooner Alec Benjamin and Rap duo Rae Sremmurd.Now given Tool’s smashing album success this week, you’d expect to see them similarly trouncing their fellow artists with similar music metrics.However, the opposite is the case: Tool only wields 830K Spotify followers, while Rae Sremmurd has over 5.1M and Arcangel has over 3.8M.Similarly, both artists also trounce Tool with regard to Spotify Monthly Listeners -- the rap and reggaeton stars are collecting almost 11M unique streamers on the Swedish platform while Tool only has half that.But that’s why it’s important to take into account more hits-driven artists vs. album-driven artists: Tool’s fans have long known they don’t go by industry rules and that’s part of why they love them.Six of the new album’s ten tracks clock in over 10 minutes each and the packaged CD released with a 4-inch HD screen inside of it to play its visual arts-driven music videos to their fans that bought it.So while no single Tool songs are appearing on Apple Music or Amazon track charts, the album sits at No. 14 on Apple’s Album charts and leading their Rock one. They also take No. 17 on Amazon’s Album charts and No. 1 on its Rock chart.This breaks the normal correlation between each platform’s track and album charts...which just goes to show that Tool is doing things their way, in a big way.As most music markets continue to digitize away from the physical world, Tool is showing that while the album format still has its charms, they are likely also benefitting from a   rising tide where metal fans are digitizing themselves.Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday, Sept. 11, 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, and we’ll see you on Friday!

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!

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!

HighlightsIt’s Excursion Thursday and we’ll be exploring the music tastes of not London, not New York, not LA….but Quezon City. Don’t know where that is? Well, pack your bags.Mission   Good morning, it’s Jason here at Chartmetric with your 3-minute Data Dump where we upload charts, artists and playlists into your brain so you can stay up on the latest in the music data world.DateThis is your Data Dump for Thursday May 16th 2019.Excursion Thursday: Quezon CityWe’re trying out a new segment called Excursion Thursday where we explore the music profile of a city or region and see what’s good.And for kicks, let’s start out with a city you may frequently see in your own streaming platform data but may not be that familiar with: Quezon City in the Philippines.If you’re not familiar with the Philippines, it’s a country in SE Asia. South of Taiwan, east of Vietnam, and north of Indonesia.It’s really thousands of islands that also feature two official languages: Tagalog and English. This is obviously important for the Western music market and definitely a factor in why the Philippines can play a huge part in how English language artists fare in the region.For example, American singer Khalid currently has the most Spotify monthly listeners on the entire Swedish platform at 49.6M.While his most popular Spotify cities are LA and London at 1M monthly listeners, and Chicago, Dallas and NYC between 800K to 1M...Quezon City silently pulls up in the #6 spot with a whopping 769K monthly listeners. Not bad for a city you might have not known about.Examples in other genres include rapper Travis Scott pulling 202K local monthly listeners and English pop rockers the 1975 featuring 126K themselves.Now, Quezon City sits adjacent to Manila, the country’s capital, and loosely speaking, is what Orange County is to Los Angeles, or what Brooklyn is to Manhattan: a bigger, heavily populated extension of its more popular sister city.Besides the language connection, part of what is likely driving such strong streaming activity specific to Quezon City is the fact that two of the country’s most popular universities- the University of the Philippines Diliman and Ateneo de Manila- are also located here.Some of the top artists by YouTube video daily views show more of a regional focus: K-pop supergroup BLACKPINK currently has 496K local daily views, BTS 215K and Korea/Japan-focused girl group TWICE at 136K.However Western artists still stand toe to toe, with Taylor Swift at 253K local daily views, Post Malone coming in at 127K and Brad Kane at 241K.Wait what? Who’s Brad Kane, you say? Well, if you were around for the original Disney animated movie Aladdin in 1992, he was the original singing voice for main character on the soundtrack.And how does this make sense in Quezon City? Well, if you don’t have any Filipino friends, suffice it to say that karaoke is a national pastime, and well, practicing the Disney hits are probably a part of what’s going on here.Now when it comes to Instagram, this is a whole other world. While in the States, Instagram is the natural social media backdrop to the music industry, Western artists just aren’t that popular for Quezon City citizens.As a matter of fact, the first Western music artist that shows up on our top followed IG artists is Hailee Steinfeld in 58th place at 62K. And before her are a legion of Filipino artists who, like Steinfeld, either bounce between the worlds of music/TV/film or make OPM.Now if you don’t know what OPM is, that stands for Original Pilipino Music, which stands next to the country’s love for Western music, as a matter of pride in their domestic artistry. It’s so popular that Spotify made an OPM hub that Music Ally wrote about back in February. The star playlist is called Tatak Pinoy, featuring OPM music and over 1M followers to date...check it out!So next time you see Quezon City in your streaming data, hopefully this will put some context to it...and while you’re at it, might as well license your tunes to Filipino karaoke bars posthaste!OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Thursday May 16th 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 Thursday, see you tomorrow!

HighlightsIt’s Winner Wednesday and we’re looking at who got added to the most Apple Music playlists in the past 30 days...and the winner is the polar opposite of Taylor Swift!Mission   Good morning, it’s Jason here at Chartmetric with your 3-minute Data Dump where we upload charts, artists and playlists into your brain so you can stay up on the latest in the music data world.DateThis is your Data Dump for Wednesday May 15th 2019.Winner Wednesdays: Apple Music “Trending on Playlists”One chart that we like to check out occasionally is the “Trending on Playlists” chart that we compile here at Chartmetric.Trending on Playlists finds the tracks that were added to the most playlists in the past 30 days and sorts them in descending order.So we’re essentially looking at not just what the editorial playlists are doing, but also what the 3rd party curators are including to see what the platform’s entire user base is favoring. This is useful because it’s theoretically closer to what “the people” are interested in, as opposed to just what the platform itself is trying to promote.But in addition to that, it tends to uncover interesting mini-trends that are underway yet likely unnoticed. Let’s check this out for Apple Music. For yesterday, May 14th, we see a few things that are totally expected.For example, of the top 200 trending in playlists tracks, the #1 most popular genre tag is “pop” at 52 instances. Hardly surprising. Neither is the #2 genre tag, “hip-hop/rap” at 28 instances.When we look at the top most added tracks, we find familiar faces: Taylor Swift leads in the #1 slot with “ME! (feat. Brendon Urie)”, which was released about 3 weeks ago and added to 236 Apple Music playlists since then.Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber’s new “I Don’t Care” single was barely in 2nd place with 234 playlist adds and only released last week, and Shawn Mendes’ 2-week-old “If I Can’t Have You” comes in 3rd place with 223 playlist adds.The #4 and #5 entries show a significant dropoff at 123 and 101 adds respectfully, which go to Kygo and Rita Ora’s single off the new Pokémon movie soundtrack and Madonna’s recent Latin collaboration with Maluma.The rest of the top 200 are below 100 playlist adds and slope down more gently...this shows that at least for yesterday, the cumulative playlist adds are very focused on only a handful of tracks. A few spot checks earlier in 2019 show the same trend on Apple Music. So it’s good to be in the limelight….if you’re one of the chosen few.Another neat trend is about ¾ of the top 200 trending in playlists tracks are 1 week to 1 month old, and if you include the really new releases within 1 week, you are looking at 90% of the list.This is certainly expected as new releases would tend to be what’s added to the most playlists in the past 30 days.But what might be surprising is that 21 of these tracks are pre-releases, which is an Apple Music exclusive feature to date: Madonna and Maluma’s track, Mark Ronson’s new release with Lykke Li and 19 other tracks haven’t been officially released with their album, because those dates are still in the future.This goes to show that Apple is clearly using this new pre-release mechanism to great effect with some of the industry’ biggest names as something that helps Apple promote Apple, as well as artists pump up their stream counts and saves upon official album release.Last but not least, a third cool insight about trending on playlists are some of the lesser known music that gets highlighted: for example, the label with the most playlist adds yesterday was not a major, but indie label Moon Blanket Records with 25 tracks, far ahead of the second place label with only 10.Moon Blanket runs music for the two most added artists yesterday- Cover Kid with 15 adds and Filtered Light with 10- who respectively make relaxation music.Cover Kid’s playlist adds include piano soundtrack renditions from popular American animated films like “Up”, “Mulan” and “Inside Out”, while Filtered Light produces religious flute-oriented instrumental tracks.And if you think their adds don’t sound like much, Cover Kid has 518 unique track-playlist instances throughout the Apple Music ecosystem while Filtered Light has 859...which is pretty awesome for any act, let alone an indie label.So if you’re looking for some unique playlist behavior, feel free to check out any of our Trending on Playlist charts...and in the meantime, I’m going to go learn the flute.OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday May 15th 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 Wednesday, see you tomorrow!