Today’s Top Hits at almost 23M followers remains Spotify’s crown jewel
Billboard Emerging Artist Kiana Ledé begins to spread her wings
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 April 10th 2019.
Playlist Highlight
With 9M more followers than the #2 Spotify playlist, Today’s Top Hits remains playlist supreme on the Swedish streaming platform.
Growing at 1% (or ~170K) followers in the past month, the list is at 22.9M of them and is due to break the 23M mark within a month.
For the past 2.5 years, it’s been disciplined at keeping only 50 tracks, though this week, it’s added a few more to total 53.
Leading that list is Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus with the “Old Town Road - Remix”, and American singer-songwriter Alec Benjamin in the #2 spot with the sad breakup song “Let Me Down Slowly”.
The inescapable Billie Eilish holds down the bronze medal at #3 with the kick-drum-driven “bad guy” off her hot new album.
55% of Today’s Top Hits this week comes from American artists, while 10% of the list comes from the United Kingdom, including Glasgow’s indietronica CHVURCHES and London-based Rita Ora in a collaboration with Brazil’s Anitta.
Puerto Rico contributes to about 5% of the list with tracks from reggaetón kings Daddy Yankee, Ozuna and Farruko.
In terms of track adds and removals, most of the frontline playlist gets added on Global Release Friday, but Today’s Top Hits tends to remove tracks more loosely across Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
In the past month, 58% of the tracklist got refreshed, and the adds are typically new releases. This week for example, 31 of the 53 tracks are brand new.
Despite Today’s Top Hits reputation as a place for new records, it’s good to remember that once a track gets put on, it tends to live there: over 75% of the historical tracks they’ve placed stay on for 1-6 months.
For a deeper dive, check out our Today’s Top Hits blog post in the show notes.
Artist Highlight
“I don't gotta be in love with you to love you”. That is a lyric from Phoenix-born, LA-based artist Kiana Ledé, who is hiding down in the #46 spot of Today’s Top Hits with the sultry and bittersweet breakup track “EX”.
The R&B singer who moonlighted as an actor on MTV’s Scream and Netflix’s All About the Washingtons, her music career has been on a major marketing push since last month.
With 5.2M Spotify monthly listeners and 213K followers, this puts her at an excellent listener to follower ratio of 25. For context, AWAL superstar Lauv is at 24.1 and young American pop star MAX at 25.3.
Ledé’s playlist situation completely blew up in March, adding the 4.9M follower Are & Be Spotify playlist and 1.8M follower Hot Rhythmic playlist, as well as being added to the sexual contextual playlists Love, Sex and Water at 1.6M and Bedroom Jams just under 1M.
She’s in the #33 position on the 65-track Today’s Hits Apple playlist in the US, and virtually all of the storefronts for the A-List: R&B playlist, ranging from position #16-33 depending on the country.
On Amazon Music, she’s on six editorial playlists, including the genre-focused Introducing: / Fresh / and Chill R&B playlists.
Not limited to digital, her radio play in the South is strong with over 430 radio spins in Florida, 374 spins in Lousiana and 343 spins in Texas since the beginning of the year.
With her smooth sound, Hollywood connections and her recent publicity push on Billboard, we’re sure to see more of Ms. Ledé in the months to come.
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday April 10th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.