This week, two huge artists let the track lists of their upcoming albums slip and a couple of other big names released music videos. Let’s see if they reaped any data rewards.
Mission
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Date
This is your Data Dump for Friday, Oct. 25, 2019.
Track List Reveals and Music Videos: Stunts or Bumps?
Coldplay and Miley Cyrus let the track listings for their respective upcoming albums drop this week, while Doja Cat and Selena Gomez released some music video eye candy to promote their upcoming album releases.
We’re not saying the strategies are mutually exclusive by any means, but what are the actual gains from each, from a data perspective?
Coldplay, who cheekily revealed the track list of their upcoming album by posting a classified ad in North Wales’ Daily Post, have been pretty good about staying in the spotlight, but amidst collabs and side projects, they’ve still managed to put together a double album called “Everyday Life,” which is due out Nov. 22.
So far, the sneaky announcement has garnered tons of press, helped along by the release of “Arabesque” and “Orphans,” two tracks from each album.
It probably didn’t cost them very much, either.
While the effect seems relatively negligible now due its two-day freshness, across most platforms, they’re showing signs of an upward trajectory.
They’ve gained some 30K Spotify followers, 5K Insta followers, 2K Twitter followers, and 8.5K Wikipedia views.
They’ve also increased their Spotify popularity by a point, which is not insignificant in just a day or two’s work.
Clearly, Coldplay had a lot of intention behind their track list leak, but Miley Cyrus’ situation is a bit murkier.
Seeing as she hasn’t released anything “tangible” this week, her metrics are a bit more stagnant, which is not to diminish her No. 10 rank across eight platforms, according to our Cross-Platform Performance ranking system.
Two artists who have some audiovisual tangibility to show are former Disney star Selena Gomez and LA-based rapper Doja Cat.
Gomez’s “Look at Her Now” music video has bumped her up in terms of fan acquisition on Spotify, Instagram, Twitter, SoundCloud, and YouTube, but her streams and views aren’t seeing a huge lift … yet.
She did just release two new singles within a day of each other, so those follower gains are likely to bump up her listener and views gains in the coming days.
Star-on-the-rise Doja Cat was trending hard on Twitter following her music video/single drop of “Rules” and her streaming numbers are climbing and climbing.
Just six months ago, Doja was at 1.9M Spotify Monthly Listeners.
That number started accelerating in August, from 2.6M to 3.7M, and just this month, she’s gone from 4.6M to nearly 6M.
Combined with her half-a-million-Spotify-followers-and-climbing, her Spotify popularity score is edging near the upper echelons of the streaming world.
With the kind of attention that Doja’s powerfully provocative video is getting, there’s some definite streaming staying power there.
So, while album track list leaks don’t appear to be particularly indicative of a data bump on their own, combined with a double-single release — especially if you’re Coldplay — they can be a relatively inexpensive strategy for generating a lot of attention.
There’s nothing like a really cool music video to train and sustain all eyes on an artist, though.
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday, Oct. 25, 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.