Is there any relation between follower counts on streaming services and follower counts on social media? Here’s a sneak peek at the trends we’re tracking for some of the biggest artists in the world.
Mission
Good morning, it’s Rutger 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.
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Date
This is your Data Dump for Friday, July 19th, 2019.
What Follower Counts Say About Social and Streaming Trends
In the old days, customers became fans if they not only bought CDs but also concert tickets — consistently and repeatedly.
In the digital era, the live space is still important, but streaming platform followers and social media followers are the new metrics for measuring fandom.
But does streaming popularity correlate with social media popularity?
Is it consistent across the board, or does each streaming platform relate differently to each social platform?
To test out these queries, we pulled follower data for artists topping the charts from January through June, and then determined the correlation coefficients for Spotify and Instagram, Spotify and Twitter, and Spotify and Facebook, repeating this process for YouTube, SoundCloud, and Deezer.
What panned out from all of our calculations and pretty charts?
For the whole story, you’ll have to stay tuned for something special we have in the works for the near future.
In the meantime, here’s a teaser: One thing that pops out immediately is how poorly Facebook is correlated with streaming services across the board.
If we take the average correlation across eight of the top artists for the past six months, Facebook turns up negligible negative correlation coefficients for Spotify and YouTube and negligible positive correlation coefficients for SoundCloud and Deezer.
Instagram, on the other hand, turns up near one-to-one correlations with Spotify and YouTube.
Twitter correlates pretty well with each streaming service — but nowhere near the Instagram correlation.
In the words of our resident Data Scientist Josh Hayes, “Seems like many of the platforms are moving in similar directions together … except for Facebook.”
While Facebook owns both platforms, it’s apparent, at least for the top performing artists, that Facebook Fan growth has either stopped, declined, or failed to keep pace with follower growth on four streaming services.
Naturally, the story gets a bit more complicated as we begin to look at trends for particular artists, genres, and more, but hang in there — the full story is coming soon!
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday, July 19th 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.