Shazam 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.
Date
This 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.
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 100
So 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!
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Monday, June 10, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.