This was originally gonna be a long thread but I decided to simplify it.

What is Playlist Payola?

Stream farms don't exist. What does exist are editorial playlists like Rap Caviar.

A 2017 paper found that The major global playlists raise streams for prominent songs substantially. Getting on Today’s Top Hits is worth almost 20 million additional streams, which translates to $116,000 and $163,000 in additional revenue from Spotify alone. Playlists also affect the success of new songs and new artists. Getting on the top of the New Music Friday playlist in the U.S. is worth roughly 14 million streams ($84,000-$117,000). Making the Global Top 50 chart raises streams by about 59,000 per day, or by about 3 million overall. Playlists have important impacts on which songs are heavily streamed.
nber.org/papers/w24713.pdf

Getting on these playlists is the easiest way for a label to force a song to be a hit. These have replaced radio.

How do you know what artists benefit the most?

I'm using a data tool which tracks the playlist reach of an artist. This finds all the playlists that the artist features on and calculates the number of users following those playlists. For example, a playlist reach of 10m means that that artist features on several playlists and those playlists together are followed by a total of 10m users.

It also calculates a playlist reach to followers ratio to find how often they feature on playlists compared to the users who follow them on the app. A high value for this indicates they are getting playlisted at a higher rate than is fair for their fanbase which suggests that labels may be paying for placements. I also calculate a similar ratio using monthly listeners in this thread and a popularity index that Spotify has for artists.

Results

Top 10 Highest Playlist Reach Relative to Follower Count
1. 24kGolden - 28.5x (28.5x higher than the average reach:follower ratio)
2. Jack Harlow - 22.4x
3. Iann Dior - 14.6x
4. Swae Lee - 11.1x
5. Mulatto - 10.7x
6. Tate Mcrae - 10.5x
7. The Kid Laroi - 7.3x
8. Baby Keem - 7.1x
9. Megan Thee Stallion - 6.9x
10. Pop Smoke - 4.6x

Top 10 Highest Playlist Reach Relative to Monthly Listener Count
1. Freddie Gibbs - 78.4% (78% higher than the average reach:listener ratio)
2. Iann Dior - 77.3%
3. Mulatto - 67.6%
4. Pusha T - 64.6%
5. Gucci Mane - 64.6%
6. Young Thug - 64.4%
7. SZA - 55.0%
8. Gunna - 54.9%
9. Lil Baby - 52.0%
10. Roddy Rich - 50.0%

Top 30 Averaged by Rank in Each of the above
1. iann dior
2. Mulatto
3. Freddie Gibbs
4. Gunna
5. Young Thug
6. Jack Harlow
7. Tate Mcrae
8. Roddy Rich
9. SZA
10. Lil Baby
11. Cordae
12. Gucci Mane
13. Machine Gun Kelly
14. Charli XCX
15. Doja Cat
16. Rich the Kid
17. dvsn
18. blackbear
19. Kane Brown
20. Clairo
21. 24kGoldn
22. Pusha T
23. Lil Mosey
24. Christina Aguilera
25. Chris Brown
26. Dababy
27. Sia
28. Pop Smoke
29. Cardi B
30. Jason Derulo

Limitations

There's a bunch of issues with this obviously. First off I had to manually collect data so I picked artists from a list of popular artists and ones I thought KTT would want to know about. This skews averages and maybe misses some obvious plants.

Second playlist reach is heavily biased by them having a hit song. For example 24kgoldn has a hit song but a low following count so his playlist reach to following ratio is high. Monthly listeners helps to control for this but the issue with monthly listeners is reverse causality. If the artist has a high playlist reach they will also have a high monthly listener rate. Spotify's popularity index is difficult to understand the methodology and has limited variance which affects results.

If you want me to tell you how much an artist is benefitting from playlists quote this and tell me the artist! I have data for around 200 right now and can grab data for any artist you give me

also if you have ideas for other measures to assess an artists popularity to then compare playlist reach please let me know!

Drake
Kendrick
Cole

I’m assuming drake is benefiting from it the most since he puts out the most music.

Interested in Kendrick and Cole 🤔

I don't think I've heard a song by 24kGolden

Great thread 👍🏾

Also 24kGolden the biggest industry plant ever.

So Mullato has industry invested in her, I just found about her last week

my goal is to set up a website that scrapes this data automatically from Spotify's api and you can just search for an artist and it will tell you how much they are playlisted compared to other artists when weighted for popularity

Bro do you have a Twitter ?

no sir

cut the Spotify popularity index calculations
they dont past the smell test to me I suspect playlist reach is part of their methodology and is f***ing with the results

added a top 30 based on average rank in each category

What platform’s playlisting do you think is most effective in creating or breaking hits, Spotify or AM ?

Drake
53.6% lower playlist:follow ratio than average
12.1% higher playlist:monthly listener ratio than average

J. Cole
53.5% lower playlist:follow
19.5% lower playlist:monthly listener than average

Kendrick
49.6% lower playlist:follow
11.4% lower playlist:monthly

Ranked by average rank for each category within my sample (highest gets more playlisting):
1. Drake
2. Kendrick
3. J. Cole

Spotify definitely
I cant remember the exact figures but I remember reading that around 30% of all streams on Spotify are from editorial playlists compared to something like 10-15% on AM

AM has a higher user base in the US but they dont use the playlists anywhere near as much so the AM charts are a more organic look at what's being searched for and listened to rather than just presented to the user

Clairo

who the f*** is mulatto

In

""""artists""""

damn ian dior exposed

yea I mentioned it in limitations - having a hit song and being a new artist skews that. the monthly listeners calculation should remove that bias but introduces reverse causality.

to get a true comparison I want to find a proper data provider to calculate artist popularity that doesnt have these issues but in the meantime by averaging the two of them we can get an acceptable generalized look

its also worth noting that part of the reason that song is a hit is because it got such strong playlisting

Gonna be the biggest star out of this years xxl class

His hit song ain’t even because of him, that’s crazy