Categories
Most Playlisted

Most Playlisted This Week

Every Monday, these charts update to show which of the playlists I track have updated in the week prior, which tracks and which artists have received the most playlist adds, and what percentage of updated playlists they made it onto.

Most Playlisted | Tracks

These are the individual tracks that have gained the most adds across the playlists I track this week. The P3 Score is added here to give some more context. P3 stands for Percentage of Possible Playlists, and is simply an expression of how many of the playlists that updated this week a track appeared on.

Chart shows top ten by default, but you can scroll down for the full list.

Most Playlisted | Artists

Similar to the above, this shows the individual artists who – with any song – gained the most playlist adds. While much (and sometimes all) of the artists who appear here also appear on the Most Playlisted Tracks chart above, when an act releases an album, multiple tracks can appear on different playlists. This chart allows you to see which artists are consistently lighting up the lists with tracks from LPs or EPs instead of just scoring against one track’s performance.

Chart shows top ten by default, but you can scroll down for the full list.

Most Playlisted | P3 vs Followers

This chart is showing you is not just the number of adds but also a couple of other things, including the artists’ P3 Score (see the Most Playlisted Tracks section above), as well as their number of followers (as at the time of being added to the playlist).

You can use this chart to look for those acts which were not only got playlisted a decent amount of times, but who also have a follower count that is relatively low compared to other acts with a similar number of adds. For me, that’s a pretty solid signal that the artist is getting disproportionate attention from tastemakers (or their algorithms), and as such are well worth keeping an eye on.

Charts are scrollable and cross-filtered, so you can click on an artist to see which lists they were added to, or click on a playlist to see which artists were added.

Most Playlisted | Track Adds By Playlist Type

This is a little subjective, but I’ve classified each of the playlists I track as either ‘Major’ or ‘Independent’. The classification is a bit fuzzy, but is basically along the lines of ‘major outlet’ and ‘everyone else’. Playlisters like Spotify, Triple J, Double J, and The Guardian go under ‘Major’, while everything else goes under ‘Independent’.

Because the ‘majors’ have both so many playlists and so many followers, it can be useful to see whether the support a track is getting is weighted towards more PR- or algorithm- driven outlets, or towards more grassroots and editorially-driven playlists (or, best of all, both).

Again, it’s a bit fuzzy, but I find it directionally quite useful.

Chart shows most added tracks by default, but you can scroll down for the full list.

Update Summary | All Playlists

This chart is pretty straightforward, but it tells you which playlists have updated, and what types of artist or track they added. Useful for understanding the environment of the week – for instance, it might have been a particularly busy week for playlist updates, or it might have been week where predominantly established artists dominated the playlists at the expense of emerging ones. I find it useful to get a sense of how much new music by new artists is out there in any given week, but it might give you other useful context.

Where there is overflow on these charts, you can scroll down to see the full list.


About the data

I’ve set up some robots to track the most credible playlists in Australia to see which artists are being picked up by which tastemakers.

While streaming numbers are great, they’re quite hard to get hold of but are also very backward-looking – by definition, an artist with a bazillion stream is already successful. What I’m interested in is who’s bubbling under, which artists are most likely to make moves next.

For me, playlist additions are a useful signal. Because playlists have finite spots to give away, because they are compiled both by editorial (ie human) and algorithmic methods, and because we can extract things like relative follower counts (not just numbers of streams), by using this pool of new-music focussed, Australian artist-leaning playlists, you can get a sense of which artists are punching above their weight with critics and tastemakers at-or-near the time of a track’s release – ie before the stream results are in.