The Power of Spotify Playlists
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We all know that Spotify playlists drive listeners. But, how powerful are they?
We did research to find out, and the result was eye-opening. We discovered that artists’ top five playlists drive as much as 60% of monthly listeners.
Here’s our first example: The Weeknd.
The Weeknd — Monthly Listeners vs Followers
According to Spotify, The Weeknd reaches almost 40 million listeners monthly and has 4.5 million followers.
Where are all the listeners coming from? Big playlists, like the five shown here:
Here’s the breakdown.
Out of 40 million monthly listeners, as much as 6.4 million of them (or 26%) of them are coming from the five playlists.
That was The Weeknd, one of the biggest artists in the world. But what about a less-known artist, like KREAM?
KREAM boasts 4.8 million monthly listeners but has only 3,747 followers on Spotify. What’s happening here? The answer is clear — when you check out the monthly listeners, they are coming from playlists.
According to Chartmetric, their song Taped Up Heart was added to Today’s Top Hits on November 4th, 2016, and is currently in 39th place.
To recap, here are the numbers:
KREAM has 3,747 followers on Spotify, but they are reaching 4.8 million monthly listeners, thanks to 3 million listeners coming from 5 playlists.
We call this “playlist leverage”. In KREAM’s case, they are getting 801x more monthly listeners than the number of followers they have.
We wanted to see this impact on a larger scale, so we wrote down follower count, monthly listeners, and playlist listener counts for the top 100 artists on Spotify’s global chart.
The ‘dependency’ on the top 5 playlists for a given artist ranged from 6.77% (Justin Timberlake) all the way to 65.41% (State of Sound). You see what’s happening here. Here are 10 artists who have the lowest dependency on playlists:
- Justin Timberlake
- Ed Sheeran
- Twenty One Pilots
- Kungs
- Lil Wayne
- Coldplay
- Rihanna
- Chance The Rapper
- Alan Walker
- DNCE
By contracts, playlists are crucial to the following 10 artists:
- Cashmere Cat
- IAmChino
- James Hersey
- Nause
- Petit Biscuit
- Luke Christopher
- Hearts & Colors
- Vice
- MiC LOWRY
- KREAM
- State of Sound
On average, top 100 artists have 25% of their monthly listeners coming from top 5 playlists. The median value was 20.63%
What does this mean?
First, Spotify playlists have a huge impact on monthly listening, even more than what we thought.
Second, the more established an artist is (having their own fan base), the less help they need from playlists.
Third, each artist gets a different number of listeners even from the same playlist, depending on the number of songs and the duration.
Chartmetric makes all of this information visible through its sleek user-friendly interface. Sign up today for a free trial, and see the power of our playlist tracking engine!
