Oct 29 2019 3 mins
- Highlights
- If a song was a traveller making its way through the playlist world, what would its passport look like? What connections could we make through the playlists it went through? Vamos a ver.
- 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.
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- Date
- This is your Data Dump for Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2019.
- Track Journeys on Today’s Top Hits...Where Do Tracks Go?
- These days playlists are a given standard in the recorded music industry, and naturally they get a lot of our attention.
- Tracks come and go through these curated collections and…wait a minute...where do these tracks come from and where do they get added to after? Let’s dig in.
- So an easy point of reference to start from is Spotify’s flagship playlist, Today’s Top Hits with 24.5M followers. We’ve collected over 1K tracks that the 50-track list has placed since May 2016.
- It changes the majority of its list every Friday, though sometimes it sneaks in a track or two on Mondays and Wednesdays.
- Now, where do all of these tracks come from?
- Using a new feature we call Playlist Track Journeys, we can look backwards and see common tracks that Today’s Top Hits has with other Spotify playlists.
- For example, it might not be a surprise that more than 25 official New Music Friday playlists (including those from Germany, the Philippines and Turkey) place tracks just before or concurrently with TTH, as both playlists frequently are showcases for well-established artists to premiere new work.
- But did you know that 37% of Spotify's Pop Rising tracks were added before TTH? For example, over three months ago, Pop Rising added Sam Feldt’s “Post Malone” track on May 27th and 23 days later on June 19th, the track got added to Today’s Top Hits, jumping from Pop Rising’s 1.8M followers to the big show with over 10x the amount of TTH followers, in less than a month.
- Other playlists have common track DNA with TTH, such as Get Popped! with 218K followers and 26% track overlap, as well as Digster’s Danish playlist Hits Nu, with 185K followers and 12% overlap.
- If that weren't enough, we can also look forward as well: looking at where TTH tracks go after they were added to the flagship list.
- In this case, Ali Gatie’s acoustic guitar-driven ballad banger “It’s You” got added to the Global Top 50 playlist nine days after it was added to TTH, part of a 46% track overlap.
- Or another insight is that 67% of the Lithuania Viral 50 playlist got added to its catalog after first being added to TTH, sometimes as much as 30 days later. This seems to indicate some sort of market lag Western hits experience locally, which can be useful information.
- Now whether looking back or forward, correlation is certainly not causation, and let us be the first to say it. But there is still an advantage to understanding some of the relationships between playlists through the common song histories they share.
- It could also provide a general path for your new music to emulate, especially if you're nurturing an emerging artist's career, going from lower tier followed lists to more prominent ones. The uses are many, so we’ll see in the months ahead what other parts of the playlist ecosystem we can begin to understand.
Outro
- That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.
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- And article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com
- Happy Wednesday, we’ll see you on Friday!