Spotify’s Fresh Finds celebrate indie music in our aggregate chart
American producer Marshmello sees a 375% increase in Indian YouTube views for his cross-border collaboration
Amazon Music’s “All Hits” assumes its place as the tech giant’s flagship 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.
Date
This is your Data Dump for Monday April 1st 2020. Just joking, it’s still 2019. Happy April Fool’s Day.
Charts
Once a week, our Spotify Fresh Finds chart aggregates the platform’s eight discovery-oriented playlists. For the chart ending on March 28th, there are 402 tracks total with the dance track “Your Love” by French DJ Mercer being the most playlisted of the bunch at 42.
According to Quartz, Spotify’s non-personalized, human-curated playlist series focuses on a designated set of tastemakers that have proven to show high listening activity on unknown tracks before they become popular.
For the previous week, Mercer’s dance track appeared on two Fresh Finds playlists: the main one and also the Fresh Finds: Basement playlist, which caters to electronic and dance music fans.
The main Fresh Finds playlist features 659K followers and the Basement version features 42K, but with its focus on independent artists/labels, the Fresh Finds series is more about taste-making: the few forecasting tomorrow’s sounds for the many.
114 of the 402 aggregate tracks have 4+ minute durations, no genre tag appears more than 3 times, and labels/distributors such as DistroKid, !K7, Empire and Platoon led the chart with a total of 16 tracks, companies made their reputations as being fiercely indie….so if you’re lacking in the hipster friend department, check out Fresh Finds to fill in the void.
Artist Highlight in the News
On February 1st, American DJ/producer Marshmello released an India-US collaboration with Mumbai-based composer Pritam entitled “BIBA”, which currently has a Spotify Popularity Index of 72 out of 100, and over 32M views on YouTube.
Marshmello’s penchant for innovation has become very clear this year after DJ-ing a live set on the gaming juggernaut that is Fortnite while releasing BIBA at the same time.
His 1-2 punch of the Fortnite stream on Feb 2nd directly after the Feb 1st BIBA release caused quite a spike of interest in him, with both his daily Wikipedia views and Instagram followers increasing ten-fold.
However, the strength of BIBA became clear when the official YouTube video released two weeks later on Feb 14th, triggering a 375% increase in daily views in India to 2.1M, and making Indian Instagram followers his second most loyal geographic demo at 9.5%, with his first being the US at 19%.
At 10.4M Spotify followers and four times as many monthly listeners at 44.7M, Marshmello’s dynamic career moves are obviously paying off.
Playlist Round-Up
“All Hits” seems to be Amazon Music’s #1 playlist, even though there is no follower count publicly displayed. Both within the app and on the browser, it is consistently one of the first playlists you see in the interface.
Likely the tech giant’s equivalent to Spotify’s “Today’s Top Hits” or Apple’s “Today’s Hits”, it has 50 tracks currently and total running time of 2 hours and 45 minutes.
In the past month, tracks have been changed out on Wednesday and Thursday by the default platform curator named “Amazon’s Music Experts”, and roughly half the track tags are “pop” naturally with a strong US focus at 77% American artists.
“Without Me” from Jersey-born, LA-based singer Halsey occupies the current top spot, the only track of 50 not replaced last week.
We’ve got limited data on “All Hits” since Amazon Music is a new data source, but stay tuned for later updates as the Alexa-driven platform will only continue to grow the #3 most subscribed to streaming platform in the world.
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Monday April 1st 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric, if you’re enjoying the podcast, share it with a colleague.