HighlightsPeloton’s recent IPO has us wondering about the most popular fitness playlists on Spotify and Deezer, so slap on some cross-trainers and fire up those Bluetooth earbuds.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, one word and no “S.” Check us out on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook!DateThis is your Data Dump for Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2019.Music + Fitness: Shaping Up Spotify and Deezer’s Top Workout PlaylistsPeloton, the indoor fitness brand best associated with its high-energy, online-class guided cycling experiences, went public on Oct. 7th, but closed its first day 11% under its initial public offering price, according to CNN.Competitor SoulCycle pulled out of IPO-ing last year, and maybe it has something to do with the music issues Peloton is now facing: a $300M lawsuit from a group of music publishers.Whether they’re using IP legitimately or not, there’s a lot at stake when it comes to music’s intimate relationship to fitness, according to music/tech journalist Cherie Hu’s latest newsletter.And it’s definitely illustrated by Spotify’s most popular workout playlists, six of which are in the Top 100 in terms of Follower count:Beast Mode is the most popular context-based fitness playlist on the Swedish platform, and the 9th most followed overall at 6.5M Followers.Post Malone is currently getting the most unique monthly listeners from four playlist slots he’s currently sitting in, acquiring 891K MLs.Reggaeton king J Balvin and American DJ/producer Marshmello are in the #2 and #3 slots with 592K and 577K Beast Mode-specific MLs respectively.Almost 20% of the current list is tagged as EDM, and more than 30% if you include Brostep.More than half of the current list are American artists, with the second most-represented country being high-energy Dutch electronic artists like Armin van Buuren, Hardwell and R3HAB...but still comprising only 13% of the list.Spotify’s Motivation Mix at 4.4M Followers and the simply-titled Workout playlist at 3.3M are the next most popular fitness lists there, but an interesting juxtaposition may be Deezer’s most popular fitness playlist, Rock Workout.That’s right: the #1 list to work out to on the French streaming platform is based around the rock genre, which is very different from Spotify’s top workout mixes, which are usually hip-hop, pop or dance-based.Rock Workout has 342K fans and currently a 70-track count, compared to Beast Mode’s 200 track count.Up until mid-May this year, Beast Mode only held 50 tracks at once, and though the amount of slots open up in the playlist, they do a great job of keeping things fresh, with a 100% 28-day ratio, meaning that the entire list has changed in the past month.With Rock Workout, only 3% of the list has changed in the past month, even though it’s less than ¼ of Beast Mode’s track count, featuring artists such as Linkin Park, Nickelback and AC/DC.Other Deezer workout playlists like Rap & Sport and Motivation Hits at 324K fans each feature much of the same pop/hip-hop/EDM fare you may expect...but it just goes to show that not all sweat beads to the same drummer.Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are available at chartmetric.com And article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comIf you haven’t downloaded our semi-annual global industry report 6MO yet, you can find it all across our socials and in our show notes!Happy Wednesday, we’ll see you Friday! 

Highlights  Obsessed with streaming? Rightfully so, but after almost a year of coverage on Chartmetric, let’s go over some useful US radio facts that may help your artist’s overall distribution strategy.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 onTwitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook- we’re always posting useful music tidbits, we’d love to hear from you!DateThis is your Data Dump for Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2019.Radio in the Streaming Era: US Radio Facts for Streaming ExpertsComing up on one year ago, Chartmetric added 300 US radio stations to our 20+ sources of music data.Why? Well, radio is still considered one of the major ways to break an artist into the mainstream here in the States, and to many, it remains a strong advantage of the major labels, who are well-networked in the radio community.You can check our blog article about it in the show notes, but for those who maybe never got a chance to learn about the world before streaming, we thought we’d take the time to review some basic radio facts to help you put it all in context.First, a radio spin does NOT equal a streaming play! Nowadays, we’re so used to looking at total streams on whatever platform, how many plays are coming from what playlist, or how many plays came from a user’s library...but nonetheless, each stream is just a one-to-one relationship with a listener.With radio, one spin can mean thousands of listeners, at the same time, and usually in the same geographic area! A one to many relationship is how terrestrial radio differentiates itself from streaming, and it requires a certain appreciation to realize that just because radio spin counts aren’t as big in quantity as streams in a given time period, they are much more geographically attributable, they’re time-stamped, and they play to many more people.On the many more people part, one term to be aware of is “AQH”, which stands for average quarter-hour persons, or the amount of unique listeners in a 15-minute period listening for at least 5 minutes.Have you ever been stuck in highway traffic and flipped through radio stations, only to hear commercials? Well, I bet it was around one quarter hour before or after the hour when that happened.Why? The reason is the way Nielsen Audio records AQH, because by playing commercials on the :15 and :45 minute marks, they maximize the period of time they play music (and thus, get the highest AQH possible). This raises their profile for advertisers wanting to buy time and more exposure on their station.The AM Drive during morning rush hour is primo ad time, so while 5-10AM is highly lucrative for radio stations, it’s probably not when your new song is going to get played. You probably have a better chance in the PMD (guess what that is), Evening or Overnight dayparts.Location-wise, New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago stations tend to have the highest AQH ratings, which makes sense given they’re the top three populated cities in the country.Another term you may have heard is “Radio Format”, and this loosely refers to the type of genres a station plays, and it’s really more of a way for advertisers to recognize a station’s listener demographics.Surely you’ve heard “Top 40”, and that also goes by Contemporary Hit Radio, or “CHR”, and it’s what you’d expect, the latest and greatest from mostly major labels.Country is another format, and of course it plays best in the South, but also a sizeable presence in other places like Chicago.Urban plays better in the Midwest/South/East and is made up of hip-hop and rap, while Rhythmic plays bigger in the West; a mix of Top 40 and Urban where R&B, dance, hip-hop, and pop all intermingle.Other formats like “Triple A”, Alternative and Hot Adult Contemporary exist as well, we invite you to check out the blog article to learn more. Many thanks to our data supplier RadioWave and Seth Keller for their expertise.OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday, Sept. 25, 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!

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  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!

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!

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! 

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! 

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!

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!

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.

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.

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!

HighlightsShazam isn’t just in the music fingerprinting and identification game — it’s also playlisting on Apple Music with Shazam Recommends: Best New Music. 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 10, 2019.New Music Friday Monday: Shazam’s Best New Music Recommendations … on Apple Music?Did you know that Shazam moonlights as playlisting curator on Apple Music?It’s currently managing 11 official playlists, including a mix of prediction-oriented genre-based ones like “Shazam Risers: Latin” or “Shazam Risers: K-Pop”, or exclusive celebrity playlists from the likes of David Guetta or BLACKPINK.Interestingly, Shazam also runs the “Shazam Recommends: The Best New Music” playlist, which is refreshed primarily on Fridays and Saturdays.Apple acquired Shazam in September of 2018, though we have Shazam playlists dating back to early 2017.So now that Shazam is now officially an Apple asset, it’s likely Apple Music is incorporating Shazam’s unique predictive dataset as a way to predict future hits...but does it actually work?If we compare last week’s Shazam “Best New Music” playlist with the Apple Music Top 100 charts today, we can try to see if- at least within the Apple Music platform- that actually becomes true or not.After some quick spot checks, the Shazam “Best New Music” playlist is actually global: it’s the same tracks and ordering no matter which country storefront you’re listening from. So the best comparison would naturally be the Apple Music Top 100 Global chart.The last Shazam “Best New Music” playlist was updated on June 1st, and comparing it to today’s Apple Top 100 global chart, there are actually four tracks in common:“The London” by Young Thug at #2 on the Top 100“Cross Me” by Ed Sheeran at #28“Don’t Call Me Up” by Mabel at #59“Easier” by Five Seconds of Summer at #66 of the Top 100So out of last week’s “Best New Music” playlist, 4 of out of the 24 total tracks ended up charting one week later, about 15%. Pretty cool.Now, cross-checking last week’s “Best New Music” playlist, but now comparing it to Shazam’s own Top 200 chart, which is its own chart independent of the Apple platform, we have the same, and only the same, four tracks pop up: the ones from Young Thug, Ed Sheeran, Mabel and Five Seconds of Summer.That’s interesting because finding tracks that are only on Apple’s Top charts are subject to Apple algorithms and other playlists, while Shazam Top charts are privy to being played in public spaces and people having the app and Shazaming those tracks.But to find the same track on both charts, must really mean that the tracks are achieving a kind of success both in user curiosity and actual streaming activity on one of biggest platforms in the world.Now, what feeds Shazam’s “Best New Music” playlist in the first place, as they are all new releases and so Shazam doesn’t really have any data on them...well, we don’t know either.Maybe they are doing granular music analysis on the song waveforms or maybe it’s just a result of traditional playlist pitching, but what we can measure in the data, is see which ones stick. Just give it a week!OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Monday, June 10, 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 Monday, see you tomorrow!

Highlights  It’s Found on Friday, and we’re using Spotify playlist adds and reach to introduce you to a tropical DJ from Spain, an American lo-fi beats producer and an Irish singer-songwriter with literary flair.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 7th, 2019.Found on Friday: Playlist Reach Uncovers a Galician DJ, an American lo-fi beats producer and an Irish Literary SongwriterIt’s Found on Friday, which means we are digitally crate-digging for new artists in the proverbial streaming record shops of the Internets, and this time through the lens of “reach”.In the world of social media, reach is the unique number of people who see a particular piece of content, and we can contrast that with “impressions”, which are the total number of times they see that content, and “engagement”, which is the number of interactions those audience members actively take upon that content.In Spotify’s streaming world, reach in one sense is obviously playlisting, and we can aggregate how many followers a particular playlist has, and at the artist-level, aggregate how many total playlist followers that artist has at any given point.These of course are non-unique follower counts, as we all are probably following dozens if not hundreds of playlists from each of our single profiles.Nevertheless, it’s still a measure of reach, and that can be an important metric for determining which artists are in a great position to break. Now ranked by number of new popular playlists adds in the past 30 days, Spanish DJ Zeper occupies the #1 spot today.From Pontevedra, Galicia, the young producer has a very accessible tropical dance vibe that has Majestic Casual vibes and would easily fit in any college student’s chillout or study playlist. Currently on 50 playlists with 10K or more followers, Zeper’s total playlist reach is over 2.8M followers, growing over 45K total followers since last week.His latest release was “Stop” on May 31st collaborating with another emerging artist KRIMETZ.Now added on an additional 39 playlists with over 10K followers each is American artist Hurley Mower.With his polished take on the lo-fi beats genre, Mower gained nearly another 30K aggregated playlist followers in the past week, bringing him over the 2M mark.With 207K monthly listeners and only 5.3K followers on his own Spotify profile, he’s got a listener to follower ratio of 38, which definitely puts him well into the promising artist category for that metric.Last but not least is Jealous of the Birds. Such an interesting name.On 5 playlists with more than 10K followers, the Irish singer-songwriter has over 767K total playlist followers, including Spotify’s Evening Acoustic playlist in the 84/100 spot and the Sad Indie playlist in the 60/80 position.She’s no stranger to attention however, her previous tracks have been from NPR’s All Songs Considered and BBC Radio 1’s Tune of the Week.No matter what you’re vibe, there’s some new artists hanging out on your smartphone, check them out this weekend!Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday, June 7th, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Do you like this podcast? Does it help your day? If so, this is the part where we grovel at your feet for an iTunes rating or review...we are a business to business podcast, so it’s not like we’re trying to blow up, but if we can grow our audience some more to maybe start a music data interest community, we think that could be a really cool thing.So if you like what we do, please give us a shout-out on iTunes. If you’re on an iPhone, just scroll all the way down on the Daily Data Dump page in your Apple Podcasts app or in the Ratings and Review tab in your iTunes app on your laptop, and show some love, Rutger and I will do a silent happy dance for every star that we get.Free accounts are at app.chartmetric.com/signupAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Friday, have a great weekend, and see you on Monday!

HighlightsIt’s Excursion Thursday, we’re teleporting to Tokyo, Japan, where local music matters for Spotify and Instagram, but not for Shazam. What does that say about public and private listening habits in Tokyo?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 30th, 2019.Excursion Thursday:As Japan’s capital and the world’s largest city with a population of around 38 million, Tokyo is the heart of the No. 2 music market in the world.Despite streaming’s rescue of the global music industry from a $14.6B decline in global revenue since the 2000s, a lot of Japanese simply don’t care as 71% of their local recorded music revenue in 2018 came from physical sales.Along with their love of physical music goods, Japan’s consumer base also remains faithful to its local artists. According to Ichiro Asatsuma, Chairman of Fujipacific Music., the breakdown of the country’s physical sales is typically 85-90% Japanese repertoire and 10-15% international.Now how does this percentage distribution hold up in Tokyo’s digital market? Looking at Top Artists by Spotify Monthly Listeners in the past month, 18 of the top 25 are Japanese, and by recent Instagram Followers, 15 of the Top 25 Artists are also local. But Spotify and Instagram are generally more private platforms when it comes to use, at least in comparison to an audio fingerprinting app like Shazam, which is utilized in a public space like a bar or a club.So, what’s the Shazam spread look like? Of the 25 Top Artists by Shazam Chart Occurrences in the past month, only three are Japanese.So recently, locals tend to prefer Japanese artists on Spotify and Instagram, at 72 and 60 percent respectively, but not at quite the same 85-90 percent distribution that Asatsuma suggests for physical.On Shazam, the preference for Japanese artists bottoms out at only 12% domestic.This suggests that Tokyo locals are more likely to listen to their fellow countrymen and women when they’re in a personal streaming mode and they’re simply curious about foreign music when they’re in a public environment.But YouTube, arguably the most “global” platform of this bunch and the 2nd most visited website in the world, seems to have more of a globalizing effect on Tokyo’s use of it. Looking at Top Artists by local YouTube Video Views, only eight of the top 25 are Japanese. Same story when it comes to Top Tracks by local YouTube Views, with just three of the top 10 originating in Japan. That’s a 32 and a 30 percent distribution, respectively, indicating international preference just might increase the more global the streaming platform gets.Granted, these streaming stats are from the last 28 days, so they’re more current, and also susceptible to fluctuation and recent releases...so if a few Japanese bangers make some great YouTube videos next month, then the numbers might be telling a different story.OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Thursday, May 30th, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at app.chartmetric.com/signupAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.Happy Thursday, see you tomorrow!

HighlightsGrab your passports, it’s Excursion Thursday, and we’re headed to Mumbai, India’s largest city and Spotify’s largest potential market.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 23rd, 2019.Excursion Thursday: MumbaiOn today’s Excursion Thursday, we’re taking off to India’s most populated city, Mumbai, which has quickly become a testing ground for Spotify’s global expansion strategy. Until 1995, the “Hollywood of India” was also called Bombay, what many in India saw as a vestige of British colonialism, hence the name change. The city’s booming movie industry lends the city its other famous moniker, “Bollywood”.Mumbai is not only the wealthiest city in India, but it’s also arguably the financial, arts, and entertainment capital of the entire country with an estimated 22.5 million  Mumbaikars more than doubling the population of New York City!It’s clear why Spotify’s weathering its recent challenges in-country, as India’s population is currently at 1.4 billion and climbing — that’s almost 20 percent of everybody on earth, while North America comprises around 5 percent. So, if Spotify’s been able to acquire an estimated 50M monthly active users out of North America’s 366M people and an estimated 60M monthly active users out of Europe’s 743M people, that gives them a market penetration rate lying somewhere between 8 and 15 percent. Apply that to a population of 1.4B, and SPOT’s stock price will rise, for sure.So, based on the city’s listening profile….how’s it going? Unfortunately, it’s too early to tap into Spotify’s local monthly listeners, but we can at least look at other Western platforms that are operating there.Mumbai’s Shazam and YouTube charts definitely reflect the battle between domestic and foreign repertoire preferences.According to the Top 90 tracks by Shazam Chart Occurrences in the past month, a total of 22 bear Indian ISRC codes. That’s around 25% of total Shazam’d tracks we captured, while there are 38 US-based ISRCs present, about 40%.Moving to Shazam’s most charted artists in Mumbai over the last 30 days, American rappers Swae Lee and Lil Nas X come in 1st and 3rd with 52 and 47 chart appearances, respectively, and Puerto Rican singer Farruko in 2nd with 50. Fourth and 5th place go to film music composers Vishal-Shekhar and star singer Arijit Singh with 42 and 41 chart appearances each.Using Top Tracks by YouTube Views, we see a mixed bag at the top, with T. Swift and Brendon Urie’s “Me!” at 235K average daily views and Katy Perry and Migos’ “Bon Appétit” at 77K daily views in 1st and 3rd place respectively. Second place goes to “Aankh Mare” from Bollywood movie Simmba sitting pretty at 188K views. Genre-wise on the Shazam charts in the past month, it’s still a battle between local and foreign fare: with Hip-Hop at 11 genre tags from mostly American artists, Dance at 15 genre tags from an international artist roster, and Pop at 22 genre tags from both Western and Indian artists. Twelve of Pop genre tags are from domestic artists, suggesting there’s a slight skew in the past month  toward the local when it comes to the genre.While Spotify competes with the entrenched Indian streaming service JioSaavn, partly headquartered in Mumbai and specializing in Bollywood music , Mumbai’s demand for both Indian and Western music will prove to either be Spotify’s ace in the hole or rock in its shoe.OutroThat’s a wrap for your Daily Data Dump for Thursday, May 23nd, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at app.chartmetric.com/signupAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.Hope you’re not too jet-lagged from today’s Excursion Thursday, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

HighlightsIt’s Winner Wednesday again, and we’re looking at who’s hot on the Spotify and Deezer charts to examine just how global Europe’s biggest streaming services are?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 22nd, 2019.Winner Wednesday: Deezer & Spotify...who's more global?On today’s Winner Wednesday, we’re looking at who’s hot on Europe’s biggest streaming services, Spotify and Deezer, on their Top 200 Spotify and Top 100 Deezer track charts for May 20th. The #1 and #2 tracks are the same across both platforms, with “emerging artists” Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber taking the lead spot with “I Don’t Care”, tallying 58.4M streams on Spotify this week and having a 10/10 popularity score on Deezer. Holding strong for almost two months now, Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” occupies the #2 position on both apps, with 41.4M streams on Spotify this week and a 9.95/10 popularity score on Deezer currently. But starting from #3 down, the differences between Sweden’s Spotify and France’s Deezer are as wide as the North Sea in between them.For example, Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus’ “Old Town Road (Remix)” was 3rd on Spotify’s chart but only 9th on Deezer, where Daddy Yankee’s “Con Calma” took 3rd on Deezer but only 14th on Spotify.Shawn Mendes and the late Avicii both appear in each platform’s Top 10 in different places, but otherwise the tracks are completely different.Let’s look at the daily chart summaries: Billie Eilish has 13 songs on Spotify’s Top 200 chart, followed by Tyler, the Creator with 11, Post Malone with 8, with Cardi B and Khalid at 6 tracks each. On Deezer, a blast from the past: Neue Deutsche Härte (or German industrial metal) group Rammstein hold the top spot with 10 tracks in the Deezer Top 100 since their May 17th self-titled album release. For those that were of musical awareness in 1998, the German rockers managed to peak on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart at #20 and even appear on MTV’s Total Request Live, which was then the epicenter of US pop culture.Puerto Rico’s Ozuna followed Rammstein with 8 tracks in the Deezer Top 100, and fellow reggaeton kings Daddy Yankee, J Balvin and Anuel AA took the 3rd, 4th and 5th spot with 6 tracks each that day. Note that Spotify’s most placed artists this week are decidedly American, while Deezer’s winners are German, Colombian, and Puerto Rican. So, is Deezer the more global streaming service between the two?Well technically, yes: Deezer is operating in 187 countries compared to Spotify’s 79, though stateside, the now publicly-traded Spotify takes up most of our headlines.But remember: Deezer really just started expanding into the U.S. since 2016, and is privately owned by American conglomerate Access Industries, who also happens to own all of Warner Music Group. So keep your eyes peeled for different charts and each platform’s preferences, as it always helps to remember that no matter where your fans come from, Spotify, Deezer, YouTube, Apple Music, and Amazon listeners all buy the same concert ticket!OutroThat’s a wrap for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday, May 22nd, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at app.chartmetric.com/signupAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com.Have a winning Wednesday, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

HighlightsIt’s Found on Friday: we dig up an American rapper, a Dutch DJ and Albanian pop star spiking in their Spotify Popularity Index.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 May 17th 2019.Found on Friday: MAJ, Adam Brown & XhensilaIt’s Found on Friday where we dip into our A&R tool to find emerging artists making their way into the public eye.If we search by the biggest change in Spotify Popularity Index (or SPI) in the past 28 days, we uncover three artists with very different backgrounds: Amercian rapper MAJ, Dutch DJ/producer Adam Brown and Albanian pop star Xhensila.I hope I’m saying these artists’ names correctly, here we go.Going from 1 to 39 SPI in the past month is MAJ, currently based out of Dallas, Texas, featuring “grunge-inflected production, soulful delivery, and nocturnal hip-hop with stark vulnerability and confessional storytelling.”With 155K Spotify monthly listeners and only 3K followers, this gives him a listeners to followers ratio of 51, which for a strong signal for him.From April 26th to May 3rd, he enjoyed a #47 slot on the 100-track New Music Friday playlist, which has 3.2M followers currently.MAJ is still enjoying a Spotify editorial playlist placement on the Shisha Lounge playlist at 375K followers, but more interestingly, he’s on 27 playlists with more than 10K followers that seem to be focused on sub-culture categories such as “sad” or “emo rap” or gaming culture playlists like EA Sports’ NHL franchise. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that these lower-tier playlists are likely playing a big part in MAJ’s strong rise on the platform.Adam Brown in the Netherlands currently has 11 dance music tracks on Spotify, with his latest track “Your Body” being what seems to be driving his SPI rise in the past month from 1 to 31.This increase isn’t from Spotify playlisting, as he’s on no editorial playlists, and his biggest one is currently “Dance Hits” by curator globalmusicx with only 6.5K followers.The reasons for his jump in SPI in late April is not clear, but by checking his Twitter, it may be from a more organic off-platform source via his own hosted local dance radio show or possibly from club play, given the very electronic music-oriented region and that his #2 and #3 top Spotify monthly listener cities are very locally Dutch: Ermelo and Harderwijk. Definitely butchered those names.Last but not least is pop star Xhensila from Albania, who represents the kind of “emerging artist” that is only emerging to the Spotify market, as Xhensila is already a big deal in her part of the world.In the past month, she jumped from an SPI of 2 to 56 despite having only 100 monthly listeners with 449 followers for a ratio under 1.Her most followed playlist, “Albanian Hits 2019” has 20K followers, but her six total tracks don’t seem to be generating that much attention playlisting wise.More than likely, Xhensila’s Spotify popularity is being generated by her 1.3M followers on Instagram, where her streaming link in her IG bio leads to Spotify. One of the lessons that can be gleaned here is that Spotify statistics are just Spotify statistics...Xhensila obviously is quite the star in Albania, further proven by her 154K YouTube followers and her nine very popular music videos there, the biggest one hitting 39M views to date.So we’ll leave you for the weekend with an American rapper, Dutch DJ and Albanian pop queen to explore...three different paths, three different vibes.OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday May 17th 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, 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: Rap, Latin and K-pop rule the Top 30 Trending Music Videos on YouTube this weekMission   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 April 24th 2019.Winner Wednesday: YouTube Trending Music VideosThe Top Songs on YouTube in the US this week aren’t too surprising, with Lil Nas X continuing to dominate the video streaming platform with an additional 48.2M views for “Old Town Road” feat. Billy Ray Cyrus.But if you switch over to the Trending Music Videos, things get a little more interesting: rapper Lil Dicky’s “Earth” takes the #1 Trending YouTube Music Video spot.The Philadelphia rapper who frequently releases comedic rap songs with high-profile collaborations does it again, this time for Mother Earth.Released on April 18th before Earth Day, the video addressing climate change had 34M views as of yesterday.Rap power couple Offset and Cardi B took the #2 spot with “Clout”, while K-pop’s BTS takes the #3 position with their still-hot single featuring Halsey, “Boy With Luv”.Latin music took 5 of the top 30 spots, including singles from Becky G & Maluma, Bad Bunny and Daddy Yankee, but the highlight is probably the reunion of New York City’s bachata legends Aventura, releasing their first new music in almost a decade with the video “Immortal” in the #20 spot.Four of the top 30 videos were taken by K-pop, with TWICE and the fresh-off-Coachella group BLACKPINK placing in the late 20 ranks.But it’s BTS that pulled off two of the top videos with the same track: “Boy With Luv” in the #3 spot, and also appearing in the #15 position, but this time, with the official choreography video.This is a common practice in the K-pop world, where the official video drops first, then the choreography rehearsal video more than a week later. This maximizes the official video’s view count, while still giving fan service while the track is fresh.BTS goes the extra mile in their case, as in their choreography videos, they don’t even use the actual audio on the video besides the low-quality track playing in the dance studio, presumably to drive viewers to the official music video.Another case of a track making a double appearance on the trending video list is Florida rapper Kodak Black, in a diss track called “Expeditiously” against Atlanta rapper T.I.The original video, which is just a static image with the song is in the #5 spot with the official video coming out four days later in the #8 spot this week.It’s worth noting that just like Spotify’s Viral 50 chart or SoundCloud’s New & Hot chart, YouTube’s trending music video chart is filtered not by total views, but the ones showing the most virality. For example, Kodak Black’s #5 position video has 5.6M views while BLACKPINK’s video ranked 29th has 43x more views at 243M. Since YouTube updates this chart weekly, likely we’re looking at an algorithm that prioritizes the most views in the past seven days, which makes sense given the recent nature of the top charting video release dates.OutroThat’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday April 24th 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!