In a digital age where independent artists are trying to break through the barriers installed by putative gatekeepers of the music industry, the golden key to becoming a successful artist is data. Without data, successful campaigns cannot be recreated and the unsuccessful ones cannot be learned from.
Spotify for Artists only gives basic information regarding listeners’ demographics and track performance. The information displayed on the artist dashboard only includes the number of streams, listeners, followers, top playlists, and top songs.
This approach, however, fails to take into account other key factors for measuring your songs’ performance. From track attributes – such as danceability, liveness, positiveness, key, loudness, energy – to data regarding how listeners interact with your music. Yet, these hidden indicators are used by the algorithm to rank, recommend, display, and playlist songs on the biggest music streaming platform.
But keep in mind: when it comes to the Spotify algorithm, no song is rated in isolation.
What is Spotify’s Popularity Index?
The Spotify Popularity Index is a 0-to-100 score that ranks how popular an artist is relative to other artists on Spotify. As your numbers grow, you’ll get placed in more editorial playlists and increase your reach on algorithmic playlists and recommendations. Some say that the magic number is 50!
The Index can be used to monitor and influence the progress of new releases. Each track has its own SPI calculated influencing the artist’s overall index. Yet, while the Popularity Index is majorly determined by recent stream count, other factors like save rate, the number of playlists, skip rate, and share rate can indirectly bump up or push down a song’s popularity index.
How to Influence the Popularity Index in your Favor
To successfully influence your Spotify popularity index, you need to understand that every stream, save, share, like, and playlist recommendation counts. All ways lead to Rome.
Do not forget that the algorithm is the major player here and the index is just one of the factors it considers when recommending booming songs to Spotify’s ever-demanding listeners.
Running a pre-save campaign weeks before the release days would give your track all the juice it needs to appeal to your first listeners. The algorithm will have no other choice than to keep recommending your songs to your perceived audience and lookalike audience. If your campaign success is consistent during the first week, there is a great likelihood that you will be placed on several algorithmic playlists.
Your pre-save campaign can give you all the traction you need to “convince” the algorithm to give you a playlist boost. According to Chartmasters:
“A song is not successful because it is a part of a large playlist. It only gets into large playlists when it’s successful”.
You do not have to leave the fate of your track in the formulaic hands of the Spotify algorithm since you can also appeal to tastemakers by pitching your music to editorial playlists.
Although Editorial playlists give your tracks more exposure compared to algorithmic playlists, songs fall off the editorial playlists easily and quickly unlike algorithmic playlists. You can remain on algorithmic playlists for months.
How to check Spotify Popularity Index
There are several tools you can use to check your Spotify Popularity Index, namely; Musicstax, Chartmetric, Songstats, and Spotify for Developers. The first three tools are the simplest while Spotify for Developers can be confusing to users with no coding skills.
Musicstax is a simple music analysis tool that allows you to check the popularity score by searching for the artist’s name or song. The free tool can also be used to analyze features of a song such as loudness and danceability. The only disadvantage of using Musicstax is its inability to provide real-time metrics, meaning the database is not always up-to-date.
Chartmetrics provides market-level data to artists who want to up their game and understand their growing fanbase. You can get a panoramic view of how many people are discovering your songs on playlists, popularity rating, and growth over a long span of time, conversion ratio, and playlist reach to followers ratio via Chartmetric.
Songstats is an amazing tool that provides artists with the data needed to effectively manage their campaigns. It lets you observe the impact of your campaign strategy and growing popularity index on your track performance.
Conclusion
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Improve your understanding of your fanbase using advanced tools to crawl data from your Spotify page. Tools like Chartmetric, Songstats, and Musicstax make it super easy.
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Monitor your popularity growth in the first week of release and make informed decisions using real-time metrics.
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Use the popularity score as a currency to bypass the gateways of algorithmic playlists.