Beatport’s Top 100 chart keeps highlighting the latest music in the club world, and today, we’re doing a
Special artist deep-dive into a Norwegian producer who found streaming success in a far-off land called...Seattle
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 March 29th 2019.
Charts
Beatport.com is the go-to electronic music marketplace for professional DJs around the world so they can make people dance.
With over 60K suppliers and labels, 450K customers and 35M unique annual visitors, Beatport is a B2B business at its core: providing high quality downloads so DJs can fill their sonic arsenal.
It also provides a weekly Top 100 chart that essentially becomes an up-to-date soundtrack to what clubbers are getting down to globally.
For the week ending March 22nd, “Inside My Head” by UK-based duo Audiojack took the #1 most purchased download for the second week in a row spending 10 days on the chart.
Spinnin’ Records had the most tracks with 4, including a David Guetta and Tom Staar track, while legendary London-based Ministry of Sound Recordings had 2.
While you may see some familiar Top 40 names such as Childish Gambino in the #3 spot or Calvin Harris & Rag’n’Bone Man at #5, the Beatport Top 100 is really an anti-pop serum: nearly half the chart’s tracks have 4-minute-plus run times, zero tracks directly releasing into the chart and nearly ⅔ of the list spending less than a week on the chart themselves...meaning lots of track turnover, and lots of opportunities for emerging artists with great dance music.
Artist Highlight in the News
Here’s an interesting case of streaming’s global nature at its finest: Norway-based house producer Simon Field found unexpected attention in Seattle upon the release of his track “Shake the Tree” on January 25th.
Field, who sports a 53 Spotify Popularity Index score and 385K monthly listeners despite having only 10K followers, is an example of an emerging artist that organically over-indexes their stream count in a particular city for an unknown reason.
Upon “Shake the Tree”’s release, it found a snug spot in the #62 position of the 90-track New Music Friday playlist for that week, which then seemed to feed playlist adds within 24 hours on no less than 20 mid-tier playlists ranging from 10 to 80K followers.
While Sony-owned playlist curator Filtr UK’s “Dance All Night” was among these lists, Field had no major label support in the release, and yet from Feb 21st to March 20th saw a 455% increase in monthly listeners in Seattle, peaking at 7.4K.
Virtually mirroring Field’s rise in Seattle however, a certain mid-tier playlist called “CloudKid” by the curator of the same name added “Shake the Tree” with 98K followers…..adding the track on Feb 16th, and removing it on March 21st, after which day Field saw an immediate decrease in Spotify listener growth in Seattle after a month long increase.
Coincidence? Possibly, except for the fact that CloudKid is an influential electronic music label & curator who came up on YouTube, with a channel influencing 2.9M subscribers with over 906M total views.
While the connection between Seattle and CloudKid’s audience is still unclear, the data suggests at the minimum an appreciation of mid-tier, five-digit follower count playlists helping propagate new music.
And at its best, Field may have a unique case of cross-platform success where a veteran YouTube curator’s side hustle (or here, a Spotify playlist) gave an unknowing artist streaming success thousands of miles away.
Playlist Round-Up
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Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday March 29th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric, if you’re enjoying the podcast, hit that subscribe button so you get the latest episodes at the earliest time.