Unpacking Shazam's New Discovery Top 50 Playlist on Apple Music


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Aug 21 2019 3 mins  


  • Highlights
    • What better A&R team to have then over 150M smartphones Shazaming every month around the globe? Let’s check out new Apple Music’s Shazam-powered Discovery Top 50 chart/playlist.
  • 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.
    • We’re on the socials at “chartmetric”, that’s Chartmetric, no “S ”- follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, and talk to us! We’d love to hear from you.
  • Date
    • This is your Data Dump for Thursday, Aug. 22, 2019.
  • Unpacking Shazam's New Discovery Top 50 Playlist
    • This week on Variety, Apple Music made some superhero-sized news with the reveal of its Shazam-powered Discovery Top 50 playlist, which aims to spot “emerging and up-and-coming” artists based on data from 11 countries.
    • According to Music Ally, the global chart is based on Shazam data from the US, UK, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Russia for now, and is a way for Apple to spot and deliver trends worldwide.
    • Apple bought Shazam in September 2018 for an estimated $400 million, and this is likely one of many cross-app data integrations to come.
    • Shazam Discovery Top 50 updates every Tuesday, and appears to be exclusive to frontline material, though they’re not all necessarily new releases.
    • Clicking through to the playlist profile on Chartmetric, we can see that seven of the 50 tracks, were released in 2018, and five of those were released more than a year ago.
    • For example, American Lucy Dacus’ anti-Americana track “Yours & Mine” currently sits in the No. 13 spot. But after Sept. 2, it will pass the 18-month catalog date, which is the industry’s traditional rule of thumb.
    • A few weeks after that, Dutch producer Mason’s itchy-footed track “Dance, Shake, Move,” currently at No. 34, will join her.
    • Interestingly, there also appears to be some genre and geographic method to the madness.
    • Unlike Apple’s other top playlists, EDM rules at 11 percent of the Shazam playlist’s genre distribution, Progressive House follows at 8 percent, and House at almost 3 percent, giving the larger Electronic & Dance genre almost a quarter of the market share this week.
    • The next biggest segment is all Latin, including Pagode, Música Popular Brasileira, Samba, Forro, and Reggaeton-each with nearly 6 percent of the distribution-and Bossanova following at almost 3 percent.
    • With the exception of the Puerto Rican-originated reggaeton sound, these genres are all Brazil-based.
    • Considering that next to the US’ 30 percent artist country distribution on the playlist, Brazil comes in second with 15 percent and Puerto Rico comes in third with 11 percent, there’s clearly a geographical alignment with the types of music presented.
    • Going another level deeper into the tracks themselves, we can expose more of why some of these songs are popping up on the Discovery Top 50 radar.
    • For example, Kosovo-based DJ Regard appears in the No. 4 position in the Shazam-fed chart, but his EDM track “Ride It” also happens to be trending on TikTok.
    • It was 40th yesterday on the TikTok Top Tracks chart with 1.9M TikToks using the track, many times the users simply doing a fun dance or showing lists of why they’re single, different, or annoyed with something.
    • While the Shazam Discovery Top 50 playlist is only currently pulling from 11 countries, it will be interesting to see if EDM and Latin music continues to outnumber Pop and Hip-Hop tracks as the playlist’s country inputs increase.
    • So if you feel like benefiting from 20 million Shazams a day, 1 billion app downloads, and users in 190 countries, check out Apple’s freshest playlist and welcome your newest addition to your A&R team.

Outro

  • That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Thursday, Aug. 22, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.
  • Free accounts are available at chartmetric.com
  • And article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com
  • Happy Thursday, and we’ll see you tomorrow!