New streaming tools at ChartMasters
Please welcome our new streaming laboratory!
ChartMasters is evolving, adding to its assets multiple tools that will enable you to easily stay updated of artists shaking the current music scene.
In this article, we present to you the lifted version of our Spotify streaming tool as well as 4 new pages, updated daily, full of meaningful data.
While our original goal was to portray the biggest names in the history of music, we fully understand that a few of today’s stars will be remembered for decades to come.
Talented new singers become stars, charismatic stars become icons, and long running icons end up becoming legends.
Where do contemporary artists stand?
One becomes a star with a hit. Icons are the ones with a lot of fans. Legends have a discography which speaks by itself.
That’s why it is key to use more than one metric to reflect the strength of an artist.
We decided to embark into a development phase so that we offer you the needed tools to follow day after day the results of your beloved singers.
You can reach this streaming laboratory at this page, as well as through the menu option Streaming Tools.
We detail its content (with direct links) below.
Spotify streaming numbers tools
Most of you already know this page. It has been growing for months, becoming the place to be if you wanna check Spotify streaming results of an artist.
Last week, we replaced the former tool with a lifted version which brings 5 great enhancements.
Heavy performance improvement
We can’t control the time needed by APIs to retrieve streams or a disc information from Spotify. What we can do though is minimize the required number of calls to these APIs.
During the last few weeks, we’ve added a local database to the design of the tool. Basically, it gives the tool a memory, which opens the door to tricks improving performances.
Although on the front end you can see an expected number of releases for each artist, the Spotify database has an awful lot of versions of every record.
Imagines Dragons for example are up to 4 studio albums. The app shows 5 versions, as their debut Night Visions has both the standard and the deluxe versions available.
On their database though, these albums add for 37 versions. When we set up an automatic process, all these are retrieved, and then streams for all of them are scanned.
No need to say that since these releases have mostly the exact same tracklists, most of them bring zero information about streams, as different versions of the same song add to the same tally.
Our script now learns from your search. When someone looks for an artist nobody looked for, everything is scanned, to make sure we don’t miss streams.
Then, the script memorizes which records brought relevant data, and which ones barely repeated the same information.
Versions adding no data are thus excluded from later searches, even from new users.
After one week, our exclusion list is already up to 63,590 entries.
These versions which can be safely ignored reduce the execution time by a factor 2 to 5 depending on how many repeated releases an artist has.
Fix of in-page releases from other artists
A well known issue of our former tool was that it listed all songs from an artist page.
For most artists, it’s perfectly fine.
Then there are artists like Michael Jackson, Sting and Diana Ross who’s artist pages include compilations that feature hits from their former groups.
Worst are situations of artists who for an unknown reason got a Soundtrack on their artist page.
It’s not so surprising for Lady Gaga with the A Star Is Born OST since she strongly contributes to it.
Still, there are 5 songs which feature only Bradley Cooper, hits like Maybe It’s Time and Black Eyes that add for well over 200 million streams.
More extreme was the case of the soundtracks for 13 Reasons Why. The season 2 appears on pages of Selena Gomez, OneRepublic and YUNGBLUD.
They all contribute to 1 to 2 songs only, while the album contains a streaming hit as massive as Billie Eilish‘s lovely that will soon break over the 1 billion mark.
The lifted version of our tool now controls the id of all artists featured on songs from the artist page, ultimately removing from an artist results all songs which aren’t his songs.
Better regrouping of songs into albums
When we select the discography view on our tool, it’s always annoying to get many folders for one album only, because of the numerous versions.
It’s impossible to automatically regroup together all songs and versions which are related to an era. They have different IDs, often slightly different titles, and different release dates.
Still, the tool now includes a bit of regular expression work that manages to group together some songs that were previously split over several versions of the same album.
If we use back our Imagine Dragons example, we can now see a clean 22-songs tracklist for their debut album.
Since the data is manipulated and compared in multiple ways through the code, it wasn’t possible to stick to the original ordering of the songs.
In fact, as the album folder actually regroups songs from multiple versions, and as we may exclude the very first release for performance improvement since it rarely includes all songs, it breaks the tracklist ranking.
Still, we decided to rate the performance improvement and data quality, with album totals now more comprehensive, over the order of the data representation.
Addition of the number of followers
At the top of the results, we now display how many followers the artist has. This information, just like the streaming numbers, is fresh, updated daily.
Followers are fans who decided to be informed of new releases from an artist.
While there is no direct link between streaming numbers and followers, having a lot of fans obviously helps in getting large numbers, especially upon release.
By experience, we can say that growing artists see their followers count increase dramatically.
In the other end, one-hit wonders are unable to gain traction in terms of fans. This statistic thus appears key to gauge which artists are here to stay.
Addition of the Popularity index
We already explained to you that the Popularity Index is way more relevant than the Monthly Listeners figure.
To follow how strong your favorite artist is going, this index, also updated daily, is now displayed at the top of streaming results too.
As it takes a lot of daily streams to smash, this indicator fluctuates slowly. In the long run, it’s absolutely fundamental still.
Artists can decrease in spite of consistent streams, this is when an other artist performs so well that he raises the 100 points scale.
The Spotify top performers
The meaning
We are aware that the popularity index is both poorly known and not so user friendly as it’s an index rather than raw data.
Convinced of its importance though, we developed this page which retrieves the top 15 best performers of the platform, but also how many daily streams they recorded.
This last statistic, unique online, adds to the popularity index the concrete meaning it lacks.
In general, an artist will need 10 million daily streams to hit a score of 90, about twice as many streams as the global #1 hit usually gets.
You read this correctly. An artist noted 90 gains a lot more streams than the current #1 smash. This just goes on to show how much a healthy catalog matters.
The process
The daily streaming total includes streams on which an artist is featured.
The page also displays the 1-week evolution of the index. While it takes a lot to gain points there, we can currently notice that booming Travis Scott gained 3 units over the last week only.
We may miss the daily streams total for new entries in this list. No worries, this will last only 24 hours.
In fact, we store the data of the top 15, so it requires one more day of activity so that we can compare the last two daily totals.
The Spotify most followed artists
To know the most followed artists on Spotify, we invite you to check this page.
The meaning
As previously mentioned, having the most fans definitely helps. If tens of millions of users are notified of your new album when they open Spotify, it’s a well deserved and free promotion.
It doesn’t guarantee your releases will always be hits. If you got 20, 30, 50 million subscribers though, it’s safe to say you’ll remain relevant for many years.
So, weither it comes from new songs or past hits, these most followed artists are the ones that are building the most robust discographies, ultimately climbing up the ladder in our CSPC rankings.
The process
Our most followed artists listing goes down to the #100 position. It’s updated daily, just like the statistic is on Spotify.
As I’m writing these lines, 24 artists are over 20 million fans, 78 are over 10 million and it takes over 8 million to be inside the top 100.
To build this list, we automatically retrieve the information for more than 600 major artists.
We will be adding new rising stars through time to make sure we remain comprehensive.
The highest gainers in followers
Check out this new piece of data just here.
The meaning
Raw streaming numbers tell you who amassed the most streams in the past. The popularity indicates who’s gaining the most streams right now. Followers counts reveal who have the most traction to keep increasing at fast pace.
What’s the next big thing though? And who’s going to slow down?
To answer this question, the most relevant indicator is how many fans are artists gaining, or losing.
It’s the circle of life. When you are a teenager, you get crazy about some artists and start following them.
These new fans will stream their fave an awful lot for several years. As he gets older, he will likely move on entirely from stanning, but he will forever keep a lovely nostalgia vibe about his former fave, and play back a few songs from time to time.
Thus, a new fan today, is someone who will grant you heavy streams for several years and consistency for even longer.
The process
Our page currently lists the 40 fastest raising artists.
It’s no surprise to see that the highest climber lately has been Billie Eilish.
Already 12th among most followed artists at nearly 25 million, she is gaining 50,000 subscribers per day.
Our page lists 3 statistics: total followers, daily gains and weekly gains.
The total followers data is important to draw the context. It’s not the same to gain 50,000 followers on top of 1 million or on top of 50 million.
Daily gains, on which the list is sorted, reflect the artists who are exploding right now. If an artist makes the headlines one day, you’ll see the impact instantly.
Weekly gains give a better representation of who’s organically climbing.
From time to time, although it’s rare, Spotify purge data from deleted accounts and the likes.
It happened on May 1st, 2020, which concluded on half a million drops for both Ed Sheeran and Drake, to point out the main examples.
Billie Eilish has a weekly increase of 88,139. Her fans are recent and her current gains pace strong enough to overcome this huge purge in a few days only.
The largest raisers in this week have been Arijit Singh followed by Neha Kakkar, two Indian superstars.
Spotify roll out in this country is only 1 year old, so they lost a limited number of fans from the purge.
Also, they are very hot at the moment with increases of 30,000 and 20,000 per day, respectively.
This goes on to show how meaningful the statistic is as Indian artists are poised to be among the big gainers of the switch to streaming.
As there are literally millions of artists, it’s impossible to be comprehensive as comparing the 1-day and 1-week evolution requires to store historical data.
Here too we went through collecting data for a lot of artists, including all the ones tracked by CSPC articles, all artists with more than 2 billion cumulative streams, the top local performers from every relevant market as well as the current smashers of virals lists.
It takes a lot to gain over 12,000 fans in a day (the current cut for our top 40), so the list will be mostly complete. If you notice an omission, please comment it to us so that we add the artist to our tracking system.
Most streamed albums from 2020
The meaning
It’s difficult to complete our CSPC rankings as studying deeply discographies of major artists takes a lot of time.
It’s even more complicated to get updated lists for new releases since the data evolves so fast.
Since streaming now takes a monster share of the music industry, the most streamed albums are mechanically among the most successful albums of the year.
While we can’t keep our CSPC articles updated constantly, we can set up scripts to scan the new releases and see how they perform in streaming.
The process
This page lists all 2020 albums that moved past 500 million streams to date. Here too if you notice a record missing, please let us know.
Since these albums are very recent, we haven’t go on regrouping multiple versions. Most of them have no deluxe release at all.
We cherry-picked the album version with the highest streaming total, and keep track of its updated streams.
Here too we use our local database to store the information. This will enable us to add evolution details, but it also means the page loads almost instantly.
On top of the best performing albums, we also added complete track by track breakdowns for all these releases.
Expect more to come in the near future. Suggestions are very much welcome, too!