Spotify has a real problem. Somewhere around 30% of Spotify streams come from playlists rather than user selection. This means 30% of Spotify's streams are decided by people other than the user - aka Labels.

This isn't really a problem on Apple - Apple has some playlists of course, but usage of these playlists is far lower than on Spotify where millions of people follow playlists like Rap Caviar.

I had a little time this week and decided to fix Spotify's charts by adjusting for this playlisting.

I got the weekly chart of the most streamed songs in the US and using SongStats I calculated the average playlist reach for the week for each song. Playlist reach is the number of users being reached by playlists that the song is featured on (i.e 100m means 100m users follow playlists where the song can be found). I adjusted the weekly streams of each song based on this playlist reach to create a new version of the Top 20 chart that removes the bias of playlisting and just shows true popularity of songs.

Previous Chart

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

New Chart

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Method

Just some quick notes so people can replicate this. I averaged playlist reach for the Friday-Thursday period for each song. I then calculated the rate of streams from playlist reach - weekly streams divided by average playlist reach. I used the median of this rate for the top 20 songs as a typical conversion rate of playlisting into stream counts. This was around 6%. From this I calculated an expected number of streams for each song - simply 6% of the playlist reach for each song. I then calculated how many streams the song actually got compared to this value. This gave me a measure I'm calling 'Streams Above Expected'. This tells me how many streams a song did compared to what I would've expected it to do if I just knew it's playlist reach. A song that performs well on this measure is exceeding what we'd expect for the song given how much it's playlist. A song performing badly is essentially being propped up by playlisting rather than actual popularity.

Some Thoughts on the Results

• It is biased towards new songs. This makes sense as for new songs users are going out of their way to find and listen to the song. I know I tend to listen to a song much more upon week of release than down the line. To me this shows the formula is effective rather than it being an issue.

• Rap benefits. Of around 7 rap songs on the chart, all increased except What's Next which fell from #1 to #2 and Up which fell from #8 to #13. Generally speaking rap clearly tends to get playlisted less compared to the popularity of the genre making it's dominance on the hot 100 even more impressive.

• Bigger artists get hurt especially pop artists. Some of the biggest drops were from songs that are generally regarded as huge songs - Driver's License, Blinding Lights, Mood etc. These are songs that are largely getting propped up by radio and playlisting in terms of charts. This isn't surprising - pop regularly is renowned for payola. This just shows that pop streams tend to be more shaky than rap streams.

• Apple Music Charts are far more accurate. These charts are far closer in line to Apple's top charts than the previous chart. A lot of people talk about Apple's charts as being more skewed toward rap and young people because of user demographics. This result suggests this isn't necessarily the case. The charts are skewed that way because those songs are actually more popular - Spotify's heavy reliance on playlisting is what makes their charts more pop heavy.

• The gap between Drake and everyone else is even bigger than the charts suggest. There isn't enough playlist reach available for him to not be well exceeding the expected streams especially early in a songs life.

What do yall think of this? Would you wanna see this done regularly?

in

In on classic thread

Ok dis music journalism

what a surprise the song that looks most like some industry plant s*** fell 10 spots😭

Lmao
Song was definitely incredibly impressive early on but the last few weeks it’s been radio and playlisted streams keeping it at 1

never heard it Im just going off the cover art and lowercase title lmaoo s*** reminds me of clairo

good job safe!! proud of you

It’s literally a Disney actress song it’s not surprising at all that it has a lot of help

oh damn

in on new safe thread

Don’t compare that to Queen Clairo

she one of the OG plants

The goat plant tho

Lil Baby stimulus

Probably gonna go #1 week after next

Will be his first #1

Lil Tjay

Great thread!

how i do the bullet points in ktt

this is dope and super interesting

Good work OP

skimmed thru this to confirm apple music GOAT

Amazing work but we gone get u some coochie bro i promise

• and write (check source)

switched to apple music kinda miss spotify, but apple music is less playlist driven