Meme check: It’s May 1st, and the *NSYNC track “It’s Gonna Be Me” becomes a thing again for 24 hours
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 Wednesday May 1st 2019.
Meme check: It’s Gonna Be Me
For all the 80s & 90s children out there, we knew where American superstar Justin Timberlake came from, and it’s name was *NSYNC.
The boy band extraordinaire enjoyed many a hit in their day...but none of them have risen to such internet meme-dom as the track “It’s Gonna Be Me”, off their 2000 album No Strings Attached.
According to knowyourmeme, it all started in 2012 when a Tumblr post associated the song with the beginning of said month and a picture of Timberlake in his infamous curly hair era. The meme is essentially highlighting the way the singer accented the word “me” to where it sounded like the month of “May”.
It’s enough of a thing that the American appliance company Maytag is using it in a brilliant ad campaign this year entitled- you guessed it- #itsgonnabemaytag
Since late 2017, it’s enjoyed a Spotify Popularity Index in the 60s range out of a 100 scale, which is one of *NSYNC’s more popular tracks alongside the mid-tempo “Bye Bye Bye” and ballad “This I Promise You”.
Throughout 2018, “It’s Gonna Be Me” averaged a YouTube daily view count in the 40-50K range. Around May 1st, it peaked to about 5x its norm to 260K views, and then plateaued out to its average within a few days. It currently sits at 94.7M total views.
An interesting behavior in its YouTube views is that it doesn’t exhibit the “weekend spike” that usually occurs with popular music. Its pattern actually looks quite random, which could be an interesting insight into how the public interacts with various types of hits according to release date.
Current Top 40 hits will most likely show strong weekend bumps due to their being included on the most high-profile playlists that get played over the weekend, while older catalog hits are listened to at more random intervals and less susceptible to day of week behaviors.
“It’s Gonna Be Me” lives out its legacy on various 90s and 2000s best hits playlists, the most popular one being Spotify’s “All Out 90s” at 4.2M followers with the track in the 33rd position out of 90.
On radio since Sept 2018, it’s only got a handful of daily spins among the most influential 300 US radio stations, though the NE states seem to still love the track.
The Nassau-Suffolk, New York and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania markets have both aired “It’s Gonna Be Me” 65 and 51 times over the past eight months, and that hasn’t even included May!
So if you’re looking for a social media wave to ride today, make sure you hashtag properly, because hey #itsgonnabemay
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday May 1st 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.