It’s New Music Friday Monday: Deezer’s Brand New UK playlist is all about pop this week and dominates Spotify’s New Music Friday playlists by follower count.
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 29th 2019.
Deezer: Brand New UK playlist
Always astute at differentiating segments of their international user base, Deezer separates several of their New Music Friday playlists by country. So much so that their #3 most followed playlist overall is actually one of them: the Brand New UK playlist.
At 5.9M fans, this frontline-focused playlist is curated by Adam - their UK & Ireland Editor, who also selects the Deezer Hits UK playlist and Trending Ireland playlists at 334K and 170K fans respectively.
Over the past year, Brand New UK exhibits a follower count history that curiously looks like a publicly traded stock price: going up for a few months, then going down for a few months.
It’s currently on an upswing, gaining over 500 fans over the past month, but it’s certainly different from the steady and rarely-wavering follower growth that most of Spotify’s top playlists have shown in recent years.
Nevertheless, Brand New UK remains one of Deezer’s flagship playlists and this week, is 32% pop, with 31 of the 60 tracks containing the tag.
Both rap and EDM come next with 7 genre tags each in this week’s list.
43% of the artists represented are from the United States, while 33% are from the UK. The rest of the list features artists from eight other territories including Sweden, Brazil, France.
Leading off in the #1 position is veteran grime rapper Stormzy with “Vossi Bop”, whose music video features actor Idris Elba and marks Stormzy’s first solo release since 2017.
Taylor Swift takes the #2 slot with Panic! At The Disco’s Brendon Urie for the track “ME!” and Lauv’s new single “Drugs & The Internet” slides into third place.
Brand New UK vs. other NMF playlists
Comparing with Spotify’s equivalent playlist, New Music Friday, the selection of artists based on nationality becomes quite clear early on.
On Brand New UK for example, Stormzy leads the top spot while on Spotify’s globally-focused list his track is in 46th place in the 99-track list.
Taylor Swift’s track position doesn’t change much on either playlist, because well, she’s Taylor Swift, but on Spotify we don’t see our next UK artist until the #12 position with FKA twigs’ “Cellophane”.
On Deezer, we already get our second UK artist with Nigerian-British Not3s in the #4 spot, who doesn’t show up at all in Spotify’s New Music Friday.
Genre-wise, the sounds of both playlists are still similar, as New Music Friday has the same top three genres: pop, rap and EDM. However, NMF skews heavier towards rap, as 21 of its tracks are tagged as such, when Deezer’s list only had 7.
And to make it all more complicated, Spotify has another playlist called New Music Friday UK, which looks much more like Deezer’s Brand New UK, as it has the same top 3 tracks for example.
Spotify’s version has a majority of UK artists, with 30 of them present in its 86-song list, with US artists coming in second place with 29 artists.
Despite all of that however, Deezer still wins out as its 5.9M fan playlist far outnumbers Spotify’s 709K followers for its UK NMF playlist, and even its global NMF at 3.1M.
So if you’re looking to keep up on Global Release Friday for the latest in UK music, check out Brand New UK on Deezer!
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Monday April 29th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.