It’s Winner Wednesday and we’re looking at who got added to the most Apple Music playlists in the past 30 days...and the winner is the polar opposite of Taylor Swift!
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 Wednesday May 15th 2019.
Winner Wednesdays: Apple Music “Trending on Playlists”
One chart that we like to check out occasionally is the “Trending on Playlists” chart that we compile here at Chartmetric.
Trending on Playlists finds the tracks that were added to the most playlists in the past 30 days and sorts them in descending order.
So we’re essentially looking at not just what the editorial playlists are doing, but also what the 3rd party curators are including to see what the platform’s entire user base is favoring. This is useful because it’s theoretically closer to what “the people” are interested in, as opposed to just what the platform itself is trying to promote.
But in addition to that, it tends to uncover interesting mini-trends that are underway yet likely unnoticed.
Let’s check this out for Apple Music. For yesterday, May 14th, we see a few things that are totally expected.
For example, of the top 200 trending in playlists tracks, the #1 most popular genre tag is “pop” at 52 instances. Hardly surprising. Neither is the #2 genre tag, “hip-hop/rap” at 28 instances.
When we look at the top most added tracks, we find familiar faces: Taylor Swift leads in the #1 slot with “ME! (feat. Brendon Urie)”, which was released about 3 weeks ago and added to 236 Apple Music playlists since then.
Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber’s new “I Don’t Care” single was barely in 2nd place with 234 playlist adds and only released last week, and Shawn Mendes’ 2-week-old “If I Can’t Have You” comes in 3rd place with 223 playlist adds.
The #4 and #5 entries show a significant dropoff at 123 and 101 adds respectfully, which go to Kygo and Rita Ora’s single off the new Pokémon movie soundtrack and Madonna’s recent Latin collaboration with Maluma.
The rest of the top 200 are below 100 playlist adds and slope down more gently...this shows that at least for yesterday, the cumulative playlist adds are very focused on only a handful of tracks. A few spot checks earlier in 2019 show the same trend on Apple Music. So it’s good to be in the limelight….if you’re one of the chosen few.
Another neat trend is about ¾ of the top 200 trending in playlists tracks are 1 week to 1 month old, and if you include the really new releases within 1 week, you are looking at 90% of the list.
This is certainly expected as new releases would tend to be what’s added to the most playlists in the past 30 days.
But what might be surprising is that 21 of these tracks are pre-releases, which is an Apple Music exclusive feature to date: Madonna and Maluma’s track, Mark Ronson’s new release with Lykke Li and 19 other tracks haven’t been officially released with their album, because those dates are still in the future.
This goes to show that Apple is clearly using this new pre-release mechanism to great effect with some of the industry’ biggest names as something that helps Apple promote Apple, as well as artists pump up their stream counts and saves upon official album release.
Last but not least, a third cool insight about trending on playlists are some of the lesser known music that gets highlighted: for example, the label with the most playlist adds yesterday was not a major, but indie label Moon Blanket Records with 25 tracks, far ahead of the second place label with only 10.
Moon Blanket runs music for the two most added artists yesterday- Cover Kid with 15 adds and Filtered Light with 10- who respectively make relaxation music.
Cover Kid’s playlist adds include piano soundtrack renditions from popular American animated films like “Up”, “Mulan” and “Inside Out”, while Filtered Light produces religious flute-oriented instrumental tracks.
And if you think their adds don’t sound like much, Cover Kid has 518 unique track-playlist instances throughout the Apple Music ecosystem while Filtered Light has 859...which is pretty awesome for any act, let alone an indie label.
So if you’re looking for some unique playlist behavior, feel free to check out any of our Trending on Playlist charts...and in the meantime, I’m going to go learn the flute.
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday May 15th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.