Reza Artamevia, “Berharap Tak Berpisah”, and Why The Song Became An Online Sensation in 2019
In 2018, one of the 80s Japanese City Pop songs “Plastic Love” by Mariya Takeuchi went viral decades after its release, thanks to the magic of YouTube recommendation algorithm. In 2019, same phenomenon happens once again in Indonesia; The early 2000s hit “Berharap Tak Berpisah” by Reza Artamevia bounced back to popularity, became instant hit and got played everywhere, even re-entered national music chart once again.
But for what reasons? Is it for the same reasons?
I was one of the many people who got into the nostalgia of Reza Artamevia’s songs this year. If I had to reflect based on my own experience, I started listening to Reza’s songs in early 2019, or late 2018 — can’t really remember myself.
It all started when my college friends went to Jazz Goes to Campus 2018 (One of the annual “Jazz” music festivals in Indonesia) which had Reza as one of its headliners. I remember one of them posted on Twitter or Instagram:
“Finally, I get to watch live performance of Reza at last🤤”
Soon after seeing that post, I felt like I needed to start listening to her songs once more… so I did! And apparently, her songs still sounded as good as ever. At that time, I also found the full-length video of her most recent live concert at The Pallas @ SCBD in 2018 (one of the club in Sudirman/Jakarta’s downtown area). The video was uploaded on July 2018, yet the concert itself took place on April, 3 months prior to the upload date.
Then I started making some questions in my head:
“If she had already made a comeback around late 2017–mid 2018, why does the song get hyped up, even overplayed just recently this year?”
The curiosity in me (+the facts that my coworkers have been questioning the same thing😜) finally led me to do this mini-research on examining why this song became a sensation in 2019. 🧐
Before we get into the analysis part, first I need to define the research questions, and gather all the data needed for analysis through scraping with different tools, depending on the data source.
Research Questions
I’d like to answer merely 2 simple questions:
- When did the song start re-gaining its popularity in 2019?
- What were the online triggers that made people rediscover and start talking about this song in 2019?
Dataset
The analysis uses the data gathered from 3 sources: Twitter, YouTube, and Spotify Chart.
The tweets I scrapped were tweets containing several keywords related to “Berharap Tak Berpisah”, namely;
- “Berharap Tak Berpisah”
- “Reza Artamevia”
- “Izinkan Aku Untuk Terakhir Kalinya”
- “Senoparty”
These are the keywords that I hypothesized to be related to the song. I’ll explain why I picked these keywords on the glossary in the next section.
I used CLI tools Twint to scrap the tweets.
YouTube
The dataset comprises of comments on official music video of Berharap Tak Berpisah, scraped on December 25th 2019.
Scraping is done using YouTube Data API and Google API Python Client library (I’m following the tutorial at https://python.gotrained.com/youtube-api-extracting-comments/ and slightly modified the code to get the exact datetime, number of replies and likes for each comments). However, I couldn’t retrieve all the comments due to API limitation (it said that it could only return max 100 replies to a comment, whereas several comments have >100 replies).
Spotify Charts
The data was gathered from weekly chart of Top 200 songs for Indonesia starting from June 30th to December 5th 2019. I joined the 23 weeks of chart data using Pandas.
Glossary
To provide some context (especially to non-Indonesian readers, if there’s any), these are the terms related to the song that I also scrap and analyze.
Berharap Tak Berpisah
Indonesian pop song released in 2002 that became an online sensation in 2019. The “Plastic Love” of Indonesian pop music scene.
Izinkan Aku Untuk Terakhir Kalinya
The famous line of Berharap Tak Berpisah’s chorus, which goes as follow
Izinkan aku
Untuk terakhir kalinya
Semalam saja bersamamu
Mengenang asmara kita
Dan aku pun berharap
Semoga kita tak berpisahDan kau maafkan kesalahan
Yang pernah kubuat
Reza Artamevia
Indonesian songstress, most popular during the late 90s. The singer of “Berharap Tak Berpisah”.
Senoparty
The term used to label the partygoers in Senopati, a street name in South Jakarta that is filled with bars and clubs. It is believed that these clubs love to play Indonesian 90s-00s music as their dance floor anthem.
Without further ado, let’s dive in to the analysis!
Let’s start with
Research Question #1:
When did the song start re-gaining its popularity in 2019?
If we’re talking about a song, we’re talking about several entities: The song title, the lyrics, and the singer.
I observed that people tend to talk more specifically about this “Berharap Tak Berpisah” song and its lyrics. Often times, I heard people singing the song, especially on the first part of the chorus (the “Izinkan aku…” part). That part was so famous that some people even thought the song name was “Izinkan Aku” instead of “Berharap Tak Berpisah”. And only a few mention other songs by Reza.
So first, I’d like to see the tweet trends for keywords related to “Berharap Tak Berpisah” and “Reza Artamevia”. I scrapped public tweets containing the keywords from January 2018 to November 2019, then I visualize it in Tableau.
I didn’t include the data from December 2019 since I’m writing the article in Dec’19, and the data for that month is still incomplete.
Although the graph for “Reza Artamevia” in 2018 was more dynamic (it had much more ups and downs compared to the stagnant “Berharap Tak Berpisah” graph in 2018) these 2 graphs have something in common: They both peaked at July 2019.
Let’s also take a look at the trends of 2 other keywords; “Izinkan Aku Untuk Terakhir Kalinya” and “Senoparty”
So what could possibly happen during June — July 2019? Let’s take a closer look, especially on “Berharap Tak Berpisah” graph since that keyword got tweeted the most.
When I tried to see the daily tweet counts of “Berharap Tak Berpisah” from June to July, the amount of tweets jumped from
Just 7 tweets on June 28th,
To 24 tweets on June 29th,
And eventually, 125 tweets on the last day of June (June 30th).
The highest peak was on July 1st 2019, where there were 152 tweets on that day that had ”Berharap Tak Berpisah” on them.
I re-check the Top 200 chart for Indonesia, and it shows that the song started making a comeback on June 30th at 24,684 plays.
So that was the trend on Twitter and Spotify chart. How about the trends on the song’s music video comment section?
The trend on Berharap Tak Berpisah’s video comments actually aligns with the ones on Twitter, as it also started rising up on June 29th, and peaking at July 1st.
For now, I think we could conclude that:
This song started bouncing back to its popularity around June 29th — July 1st 2019
Now, let’s move on to the next question.
Research Question #2:
What were the online triggers that made people rediscover and start talking about this song in 2019?
I believe that you could tell a popular tweet by its high amount of RTs, Likes, and people who quoted the tweets. Anything involved with the tweet’s engagement metrics.
YouTube, on the other hand, could tell you who or what drives the traffic to that video based on comments with high amount of likes/replies, or comments like
“Who came here from *insertsomerandomsources*?”
Translated into Bahasa Indonesia, this type comment would look like these:
- “Siapa yang kesini gara-gara *sources*?”
- “Kesini gara-gara *source*”
So, the next thing I’ll be doing is to find tweet and YouTube comments with highest amount of engagement and also the ones with “Kesini gara-gara” sentences. Basically anything that implies that they’re the traffic driver of this phenomenon, on June 29th -July 1st 2019.
What are “Berharap tak Berpisah” tweets with highest amount of engagement during the time range (June 29th-July 1st 2019)?
The most popular tweet is a meme using the lyrics of the song at its caption. While the rest of the tweets are people admitting the song was also their jam and how the song become a staple at typical South Jakarta night clubs’ playlist.
There are also 2 most quoted tweets during this date range, and those are..
Tweet from @notnorgaard, and tweet by Uus (Indonesian Standup Comedian). Although there are only a few people captured quoting these tweets during those 3 days, (6 and 7 times, respectively) but each tweets has tremendous amount (reaching thousands!) of likes and RTs. Wow! Now we’re starting to have candidates for who drives the traffic for “Berharap Tak Berpisah”. I have hypothesis that Uus’ tweet might be the driver for conversations about “Berharap Tak Berpisah”. But for now, let’s move to Youtube.
YouTube
How about the comments on Berharap Tak Berpisah’s music video? Let’s take a look on the top 10 comments with highest number of replies and likes during June 29th — July 1st 2019.
The top comments trend is looking pretty much like Twitter, as in many are talking about night-life-in-South-Jakarta starter pack. This is the #1 comment translated to English:
“Can you imagine just how fed up the staff at The Pallas, Holywings, Verde, Southbank who get to listen to this song all the time on their shifts?”
(Btw, those are the names of night clubs around Jakarta & Bandung)
On the 7th top comment, we could see Uus (that standup comedian on Twitter) (!) getting mentioned for once more, kind of validating my hypothesis?
As you can see, there’s one particular name that gets mentioned frequently among these top 10 comments: OverheardJKT. I think now I could also add OverheardJKT as one of the traffic drivers 🤔
In case you didn’t know, OverheardJKT is an Instagram account (they have Twitter account as well, but AFAIK they’re more popular on IG) where people could submit random & funny utterance they overheard in Jakarta (hence the “Overheard”JKT name).
I observed that these comments mentioning OverheardJKT are made around June 29th & 30th. So I went to their Instagram account to check on posts around those dates that might be related to “Berharap Tak Berpisah”. Then I ended up finding this post on June 29th:
English Translation for the post above:
> Bro, let’s hangout at some café
> Which one?
> The one where the visitors post IG story while shouting “Izinkan aku untuk terakhir kalinya”
And yeah, I think this is THE post that helped boosting the song’s popularity this year, at least according to the youtube comments.
So this is how I’d answer research question #2:
There are some triggers on social media that made people rediscover this song and start talking about it all over again this year; amongst them, the most prominent ones were
> The IG post by @OverheardJKT on June 29th, mentioning the song’s lyrics.
> Tweet by Uus (an Indonesian standup comedian) on June 30th, talking about the stereotype of people that would play the song in the club, which helped amplifying the conversation about this topic even further.
Answering some other questions… (Besides the Main RQs)
How’s the song’s stream performance on Spotify after it “exploded”?
I gathered weekly chart from June 30th to December 5th and map each week’s stream count and chart position, yielding this viz.
Ever since the song entered the chart in 2019, the weekly stream counts have been consistently around -+250k plays in June — mid Oct. During that time range, the song’s peak position was on #74 in July 5th — July 12th.
Later on October though, the song chart position rose even higher at #35 at Spotify’s Indonesia Top 200 songs with 586k plays a week, making it the song’s highest chart position to date. Up until now, the song has around 450k stream count per week, around twice the amount of song’s stream count on July, when it was first hyped up.
Hey, what exactly happened on October & November 2019 that made the numbers went up again?
Using the same approach that I’ve done above, I found that on October 16th, there was 1 certain video that went viral, and it featured a girl (which I found out later to be local soap opera actress @sintyamarisca) dancing to the remixed, koplo (Indonesian traditional dance song genre) version of the song.
On November though, the mentions went up because one of the Indonesian Idol contestants was singing this song. Most of her fans were sharing this video from Youtube:
Final Thoughts & Conclusion
This song was “ressurected” in 2019 due to it being one of those throwback hits that are often played as the dance floor anthem in the night clubs in South Jakarta, especially Senopati. Reza Artamevia herself was already making a comeback in 2018. But it was actually those social media posts that try to poke fun at the Senopati partygoers raving to this song that help the song charting for once more, 17 years after its release.
It was first started with that June 29th OverheardJKT post on Instagram, then followed by Uus’ tweet on June 30th that made this song become a hot topic on social media. Later on, a video of a girl dancing to this song in October 16th reignited the sparks and catapulted the song even higher on the chart. If anything, the conversation about this song has always been associated with night clubs, (Seno)party, and South Jakarta.
For me, having a nostalgia with a song released decades ago is always a fun thing to do, and my experience this song is no different. Reza’s Berharap Tak Berpisah was a major throwback hit whose lyrics are relatable (especially if you’re into one night stand, lol) accompanied with the chorus that is perfect to sing a long to, which makes it easily everyone’s anthem across generations.
And I just can’t wait to see which Indo 90s-00s pop song that would be the next “Berharap Tak Berpisah”.
Credits: Many, many thanks to my friends Gita Andani, Olivia Putri, Nathasia Carissa, Shylla Estee, and Nabila Azizah for their help on proofreading on this post.
