2019-05-17 // A rapper, DJ and pop star walk into a bar...and spike in Spotify popularity


Episode Artwork
1.0x
0% played 00:00 00:00
May 16 2019 3 mins  
  • Highlights
    • It’s Found on Friday: we dig up an American rapper, a Dutch DJ and Albanian pop star spiking in their Spotify Popularity Index.
  • 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 Friday May 17th 2019.
  • Found on Friday: MAJ, Adam Brown & Xhensila
    • It’s Found on Friday where we dip into our A&R tool to find emerging artists making their way into the public eye.
    • If we search by the biggest change in Spotify Popularity Index (or SPI) in the past 28 days, we uncover three artists with very different backgrounds: Amercian rapper MAJ, Dutch DJ/producer Adam Brown and Albanian pop star Xhensila.
    • I hope I’m saying these artists’ names correctly, here we go.
    • Going from 1 to 39 SPI in the past month is MAJ, currently based out of Dallas, Texas, featuring “grunge-inflected production, soulful delivery, and nocturnal hip-hop with stark vulnerability and confessional storytelling.”
    • With 155K Spotify monthly listeners and only 3K followers, this gives him a listeners to followers ratio of 51, which for a strong signal for him.
    • From April 26th to May 3rd, he enjoyed a #47 slot on the 100-track New Music Friday playlist, which has 3.2M followers currently.
    • MAJ is still enjoying a Spotify editorial playlist placement on the Shisha Lounge playlist at 375K followers, but more interestingly, he’s on 27 playlists with more than 10K followers that seem to be focused on sub-culture categories such as “sad” or “emo rap” or gaming culture playlists like EA Sports’ NHL franchise. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that these lower-tier playlists are likely playing a big part in MAJ’s strong rise on the platform.
    • Adam Brown in the Netherlands currently has 11 dance music tracks on Spotify, with his latest track “Your Body” being what seems to be driving his SPI rise in the past month from 1 to 31.
    • This increase isn’t from Spotify playlisting, as he’s on no editorial playlists, and his biggest one is currently “Dance Hits” by curator globalmusicx with only 6.5K followers.
    • The reasons for his jump in SPI in late April is not clear, but by checking his Twitter, it may be from a more organic off-platform source via his own hosted local dance radio show or possibly from club play, given the very electronic music-oriented region and that his #2 and #3 top Spotify monthly listener cities are very locally Dutch: Ermelo and Harderwijk. Definitely butchered those names.
    • Last but not least is pop star Xhensila from Albania, who represents the kind of “emerging artist” that is only emerging to the Spotify market, as Xhensila is already a big deal in her part of the world.
    • In the past month, she jumped from an SPI of 2 to 56 despite having only 100 monthly listeners with 449 followers for a ratio under 1.
    • Her most followed playlist, “Albanian Hits 2019” has 20K followers, but her six total tracks don’t seem to be generating that much attention playlisting wise.
    • More than likely, Xhensila’s Spotify popularity is being generated by her 1.3M followers on Instagram, where her streaming link in her IG bio leads to Spotify.
    • One of the lessons that can be gleaned here is that Spotify statistics are just Spotify statistics...Xhensila obviously is quite the star in Albania, further proven by her 154K YouTube followers and her nine very popular music videos there, the biggest one hitting 39M views to date.
    • So we’ll leave you for the weekend with an American rapper, Dutch DJ and Albanian pop queen to explore...three different paths, three different vibes.
  • Outro