Artists and their teams understandably have many playlist performance questions:

Given the current status of my track, what are the best playlists to target?

Given that my track got added toBreaking R&Bon Apple Music, what other playlists usually happens to tracks onBreaking R&Baround the same time?

Given that my track is currently onHits of the Momenton Deezer, what are the odds of it getting onLes titres du moment?

So in an effort to meet these needs, we built two main playlist analytics tools: thePre-Playlist AnalyzerandPost-Playlist Analyzer, which both look at a time-based concept well call a songs Track Journey. Both Analyzers look at the Track Journey of all songs on a target playlist, visualize the tracks commonly occurring playlists and display the percentage overlap between the playlists.

The Pre-Playlist Analyzer looks at the playlist databefore each track gets on the target playlist, whereas the Post-Playlist Analyzer looks at what happened to each trackafter it got added.

We are capable of analyzing any playlist on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Amazon, and YouTube, but for now, we will focus on a few of the patterns we discovered onSpotify,Apple MusicandDeezer.

Lets start with a Spotifyfrontlineplaylist from the Pop genre that constantly updates:Pop Rising.

What kind of journey did tracks take before arriving on this target playlist? To answer this question, we analyzed the historical data of 175 tracks that went throughPop Risingbetween a 30-day period (20190614 to 20190714), and identified the playlists that added those tracks in the past.

A few definitions: A co-occurring playlist is one that has one or more tracks in common with the target playlist. The average_timegap column denotes the average number of days between the date that a track got added to a co-occurring playlist, and date the track got added on the target playlist. The percent_overlap corresponds to the percentage of tracks onPop Risingthat appeared on each co-occurring playlist.

The obvious takeaway is the remarkableoverlap between officialNew Music Friday(or new release-based) playlists, which orients us to the fact thatPop Risingis highly correlated with new music. It conceivably could have been a playlist that listed viral pop songs that got big on social media, but were not necessarily new releases.

We can also see thatroughly 1 in every 3 tracks (31%) that made it toPop Risingwere added toPop n Fresh(orange box) 3 days earlier (on average). Now that we know a little of what feeds intoPop Rising, lets look at what happens to these tracks afterPop Rising.

The above plot shows the Post-Playlist journeys of tracks that got added toPop Rising. Note that day 0 is the day the tracks got added to the target playlist. Tracks may have gotten added to the target playlist on different dates, so we time-shifted all tracks added date to align at day 0 for comprehensibility purposes.

The y-axis (labelled Percent Overlap) represents a percentage of how many tracks get added to a particular co-occurring playlist after getting on our target playlist. For example, the top line of the plot shows that about33% of the tracks that made it toPop Rising, later made it toIts a Hit!

There aremultiple data pointsto observe in this interactive chart: if you hover over each bubble, youll seebasic playlist informationas well as thenumber of tracksthat were added at each Time Gap, or number of days after they got added to the target playlist (negative values are leading to the current target playlist, while positive values show Track Journeys after the target playlist). Theopacityof each bubble represents how much track overlap happens at a specific Time Gap (darker = more overlap, relative to each co-occurring playlist). Thesizeof the bubbles represent the number of followers each playlist has.

Notice that17% ofPop Risingstracks end up on Spotifys most followed playlist,Todays Top Hits (TTH), at some point after. More specifically, most of this sequence happenswithin a weekafter the tracks were added toPop Rising.

So while its certainly debatable if Spotify curators vet a certain track for likability before including it on a more popular playlist, if it does, it seems to happen quite quicklyeven a matter of days.

Next, lets switch genres and apply the Playlist Analyzers to the top Country music playlist on Spotify:Hot Country.

We naturally spot some genre-dependent co-occurring playlists likeNext from Nashville,All About Country,New Boots,Wild Country,Breakout Country, but additionally find the genre-agnosticNew Music Fridayhaving significant track overlap withHot Country.

This time however, we performed deeper Pre-Playlist Analysis on some of these co-occurring playlists themselves, and visualized the track flow between any two of them having at least 10% overlap.

Even starting with the two of the most highly followed of the bunch, it still seems there is a relatively low chance of getting on Hot Country even if a track managed to get onWild Country(787K followers, 10% chance) orNew Boots(654K followers, 13% chance). Nevertheless,New Music Nashville(blue) seems to be a decent bet to get on either these six-digit follower playlists (popular playlists themselves), whileNext From Nashville(green) is an even better one.

DespiteNext From Nashville(NFN) having only 80K followers, roughly 1 out of every 5 tracks added toNFNmade it toWild CountryorNew Boots.Given thatWild CountryandNew Bootshave more than half a million followers each,NFNseems to work well as a gateway to bigger country playlists.

We also see that1 out of every 3 songs featured onNFNended up onBreakout Country(123K followers),which itself is a great place for mid-tier playlist exposure.Its certainly a sweet bonus thatBreakout Countrys tracks themselves had almost a 20% chance of getting onHot Countrywith its whopping 5.5M followers.

So if youre an emerging country artist looking for lower-profile playlist within placement reachwhy not try a playlist likeNext from Nashville?

Another type of playlist thats interesting to dissect arecontext-based playlists. These playlists tend to offer back catalog tracks more spins in the long run and focus on the users life context (e.g., going for a run, having a romantic dinner), rather than the music itself (e.g., rock music, Spanish-language music).

Lets take a look at Spotifys 3rd most-followed contextual playlist at the time of writing,Songs to Sing in the Showerat 5.1M followers. 🙂

From the above journey plot, youll see that there is a~70% chance that if a track has already featured onSongs to Sing in the Shower(SSS)it may be placed on it again later! While this may seem like an odd thing to point out, remember that tracks are constantly being added and removed from playlists.

So especially for a context-based, catalog-focused one likeSSSthat is frequently refreshed,music can find its way on and off at various times, which is great motivation for artists to get placed here for random (and welcomed) spikes of unexpected long-tail streaming revenue down the road.

Our Analyzer Tools differentiate theseadded/then removed/then added againevent sequences from simply being on that playlist continuously. (Note thatSSSis a personalized Spotify playlist which shuffles a larger list of tracks for each individual user, so we are using the default,public URL playlistversion at all times.)

Whats also interesting is that there seems to be quite a fewcircular relationships between multiple Spotify contextual/mood playlists.This means that once a track places onSSS, it has a chance of bouncing from playlist to playlist and enjoy long term success.

Among the list of playlists thatSSShas a tight relationship with, there are a couple that unsurprisingly stood out:Canta Sotto La DocciaandCanta en la Ducha, the Italian and Spanish translations ofSongs to Sing in the Shower.

This would make sense, as Spotify has historically shown (at least in theirTop 200 charts) that it does a great job of globalizing and keeping A-list English-speaking artist content front and center, as opposed to other platforms like Deezer thatexcel at showcasing domestic market content.

Despite bothSSSandSongs to Sing in the Car (SSCat 8.6M followers)being highly-followed contextual playlists, the tracks landing on these playlists show very different journeys: for example, asignificant amount of tracks seem to have appeared on many non-editorial playlists(such asCleaning the Houseby curator Dancing Playlists at 87K followers)before ending up onSSC.

In contrary,tracks onSSSseem to have gone through mostly editorial playlists(such as SpotifysGuilty PleasuresorSing Through the Decades) before ending up onSSS.

For this reason, even thoughSSChas ~3.5M more followers thanSSS, placing your music onSSCmay well be the easier effort if you were to first pursue pitching to some of its feeder playlists likeMost Popular Songs of All Timethat are not controlled by Spotify itself.

As forSSS, if you are connected to Spotifys curators, first pursuing smaller editorial playlists such asHappy PoporGuilty Pleasurescould potentially be an easier sell than getting your track onSSSdirectly.

Lets say were now interested in how to get a track on Apple Musics top R&B playlist,TheA-List: R&B.

Using the Post-Playlist Analyzer, we looked at all co-occurring playlists with higher than 10% overlap. Note that we did not include major-label owned playlists in the analysis (Digster, Filtr and Topsify), though we did include Apple editorial playlists. For example, one of the playlists we analyzed was ApplesBreaking R&B.

Notice that about14% of the tracks that went throughBreaking R&Bgot added toThe A-List: R&Bat some point later. Most co-occurrences happenedwithin 10 daysafter the tracks appeared onBreaking R&B. By running the the same type of analysis on the rest of the co-occurring playlists described earlier, we compiled the results into the flow diagram below that summarizes the Post-Playlist journeys of all tracks on these co-occurring playlists (over 1000 tracks analyzed).

Roughly14% and 16% of the tracks onBreaking R&BandMe and Baegot onThe A-List R&Bsometime later. Most of the co-occurrences happenwithin 7 daysafter tracks got added on these two playlists. More interestingly, the playlist adds onBreaking R&BandMe and Baehappened around the same time as other popular playlists such asBeats of the Week,Brown SugarandMoodand#OnRepeat. For this reason, these playlists make good candidates for additional targets once your track made it toBreaking R&BandMe and Bae.

Additionally,Me and Baeand#OnRepeathave their own sets of playlists they co-occurred with frequently. As we saw earlier in the playlist analysis on Spotify, contextual playlists offer tracks continuing success by recycling them within the contextual playlists ecosystem. From this Apple diagram,#OnRepeatalso has decent flows to contextual playlists such as Summer Heat and Gym Flow.So if Apples contextual playlists also draw lots of user consumption, getting on#OnRepeatcan help establish a long-tail of streaming revenue for any artist lucky enough to get on it.

Lets say your ultimate goal is to reachLes titres du moment(LTDM), the most highly-followed playlist on Deezer (9.9M fans).

True to its reputation as a domestic-market first platform,most of the tracks onLTDMhave gone through one of the editorial, market-based Deezer Chart playlists first. One exception would be the Track Journey throughHits of the Momentat 1.2M fans, one of the platforms top playlists. Like before, we used the Playlist Analyzer tools and identified interesting Track Journeys leading toLTDM.

Before ending up onHits of the Moment, the tracks have usually gone through one of the market-based Deezer Chart playlists, with the exceptions ofTodays Best Pop(600K fans), Hits du Moment(485K fans) and a few others.

Looking back further,Pop Fresh(blue node),This is pop(150K fans) andRadar Weekly(146K fans) seem to feedTodays Best Pop(600K fans). So with only 9.6K fans,Pop Freshis certainly worth investigating as low-hanging playlist fruit.

Given that 1827% of tracks onPop Freshend up on bigger feeder playlists such asThis is PopandTodays Best Pop, we may find here a few lower-profile gateway playlists that could lead your music to higher-profile ones.

The interesting patterns we discussed here are only the tip of the playlist iceberg! There is so much more to explore and we cant wait to see what findings you will discover with these Playlist Analyzer tools.

Coming soonChartmetricsPlaylist Analyzertools!

We will be making these tools live asPremium features onChartmetricvery soon. Stay tuned!

See the original post here:

Journey Of A Track: Navigating The Playlist Ecosystem - hypebot.com