Country rules the US iTunes charts yesterday with 38 track tags
Diana Ross celebrates her 75th birthday with over 102M YouTube views
South Asia gets down with the leading Desi playlist, “Desi Hits” at 241K followers
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 Tuesday March 26th 2019.
Charts
Country fans love their downloads, or at least they did yesterday.
On Monday for the United States storefront in the iTunes download marketplace, there were 38 tracks in the Top 200 list with the genre tag “country”.
These genre tags are non-exclusive, meaning that a track can be tagged with multiple genres by Apple internally, but it makes quite the impression when the genre “pop” came in with 36 and “hip-hop/rap” at 32.
The 38 country tracks are well-distributed across the 200, with the romantic ballad “Beautiful Crazy” by Luke Combs at the #13 spot.
What’s interesting is despite the genre’s track influence on the iTunes chart, there are no country artists in the top 10 most frequently occuring artists. For example, Motley Crue had the most tracks on yesterday’s iTunes chart with 11, due to their Netflix biopic “The Dirt” releasing on Friday sparking nostalgia for some and curiosity for others.
Or Queen continues to benefit from their five-month-old “Bohemian Rhapsody” biopic with 10 tracks still on the iTunes chart.
But fear not, the #1 iTunes track yesterday actually was country: “Shallow” by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper from yet another music film, A Star Is Born….it just got coded by Apple as “soundtrack”, and is just another quirk in the music data world.
Artist Highlight in the News
Happy birthday to American legend Diana Ross, who turns 75 years young today!
Yesterday, Rolling Stone published news of her live concert film “Diana Ross: Her Life, Love and Legacy” releasing for only two days today and Thursday, showcasing her epic 1983 NYC Central Park show.
Ross has healthy numbers in the streaming world, with a 68 Spotify Popularity Index rating, 792K followers and a steadily growing monthly listeners count at 4.2M, growing from 2.9M only a year ago.
The ex-Supremes member is still rocking her Instagram account at 319K followers, posting lots of throwback footage and glamorous shots of own career, and mostly to fans her junior: over 126K IG followers are 18-24 and 97K are 25-34.
Though Ms. Ross only sports 6K subscribers on YouTube, her long career of epic music has earned over 102M YouTube views, which, given her low amount of subscribers, shows how much active search and recommended video algorithms keep her music alive. Happy birthday, Miss Ross.
Playlist Round-Up
With Spotify’s recent launch in India about one month ago, attention is likely turning to the playlist “Desi Hits”, which is Spotify’s leading South Asian playlist at 241K followers.
Growing followers at 6% over the past month, and changing about a quarter of its tracks every month, “Desi Hits” is the closest thing the platform has to the region’s version of “Today’s Top Hits”, which is at 22M followers.
While “Desi Hits” obviously has some ground to make up for, keep in mind that India alone is home to over 374M smartphone users, and 1.3B people overall. For comparison, the US market has 251M out of 326M. Or better put, a market penetration rate of only 27% compared to the US’ 77%, showing lots of potential for growth in India.
The playlist “Desi Hits” is dominated by the giant music and film company T-Series, with 35 of its tracks in the 86-track list coming underneath its banner. You may have heard of the company through its on-going YouTube subscriber battle with YouTuber PewDiePie, as T-Series is now within only 4K subscribers at 91,317,xxx subs.
“Desi Hits” has virtually all of its tracks in the upper half of the Echo Nest Energy chart, promising lots of danceable beats coming from a set of artists who are 52% from India, but 20% from the UK due to the Indian diaspora.
Whether looking for bhangra beats or Bollywood mega hits, “Desi Hits” likely has a lot of followers coming its way.
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Tuesday March 26th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric, a free account is waiting for you at chartmetric.io/signup. That’s chartmetric (no s) dot IO slash signup.