Country tops yesterday’s Amazon Music Top 100 Songs chart
Post Malone and Swae Lee’s “Sunflower” continues to grow into everyone’s ears
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 Thursday April 18th 2019.
Chart Spotlight
Yesterday’s Amazon Music Top Songs chart was ruled by country, as the top 100 tracks on the Alexa-driven platform featured 26 country genre tags.
Pop came in 2nd place with 23 tags, and rap & hip-hop came in 3rd with 16.
Billie Eilish continues her chart domination with having the most tracks with a total of eight, ranging from positions #12-90.
Seven of them are from her latest album, released on April 1st.
As for the top 100 songs and how long they’ve spent on the chart, it’s starting to reflect a nature similar to the Spotify Top 200, in that the majority of the tracks linger on for at least 1-6 months, though not more than 6 months like the Swedish platform this week.
Only 10 of the Amazon chart tracks are within a week old, with the newest entry only being 2 days old, and that’s from American singer-songwriter Khalid and his chilled out track “Talk” off his album Free Spirit, released on April 5th.
Tracking back to country’s run on yesterday’s chart, leading in the #1 and #3 position is Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”, with the original version leading the remix with Billy Ray Cyrus. Amazon categorizes these tracks as country, differing from Billboard’s initial opinion of the track.
Brett Young and Maren Morris are in the #13 and #14 spots, while HARDY and Brett Young (with another track this time) bring up the rear in the #99 and #100 positions.
Track Spotlight
Now in the #2 spot yesterday, is a track that just won’t go away: “Sunflower” by Post Malone and Swae Lee.
The dreamy, 2.5-minute track juxtaposing a strained relationship with a sunflower has over 671M spins on Spotify, with a track popularity score of 98 out of 100.
It’s also the most played song off the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse original soundtrack on Spotify, the track releasing in October of last year, two months before the entire album and animated film released in December.
It’s no secret that a killer track combined with a hugely popular movie is a magic formula. One only has to point to Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth’s “See You Again” off the Fast & Furious 7 OST to remember how viral a movie track can get.
With a 97% Rotten Tomatoes score, $375M worldwide gross box office, and endless of positive comments across social media, Post Malone and Swae Lee seem to have really struck gold.
The soundtrack itself was reportedly curated to sound like what the film’s teen Spiderman, Miles Morales, listens to.
“Sunflower” is currently on 93 Spotify editorial playlists and 38 Apple Music editorial lists, but interestingly, the track isn’t on many high profile ones.
While it is on Spotify’s Global Top 50, the next most followed playlist is the personalized Mood Booster with 3.2M followers, which due to the playlist’s track randomization, the track itself might not even show up.
As for Apple Music, it’s only on one Today’s Hits playlist in China and two A-List playlists in Norway and Canada, also not much of a promotional push.
Not to discount the track itself, but the fact that the track is enjoying its sixth month of popularity without the support of editorial playlists suggests the importance of listeners associating a song with another piece of pop culture outside of the music industry.
As Post Malone is certainly no stranger to massively successful hits, the fact that “Sunflower” is his fifth most popular music video with 500M YouTube views says that a killer track + a killer movie = a winning combination.
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Thursday April 18th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.