Spotify’s New Music Friday playlists are among the most influential in the world, showcasing around a hot hundred brand new tracks each week. There’s a New Music Friday playlist for just about every country, as well as a global version – this tool captures all the tracks added to the top nine markets. There’s more on how it works and how you might use it below, but what it can tell you is which new tracks Spotify is putting its weight behind – and who might be about to blow up.
How To Read This Thing
It’s not complicated, and can be quite interesting – assuming you’re a huge music dork.
As well as the artist name and track title, it shows:
- How many adds the track got across the NMF playlists I track
- What percentage of the top nine playlists it appeared on
- The number of followers the artist had at the time of posting
Nifty Use Cases
First of all, whoever is at the very top of the list is the artist with the most followers, who’s appeared on the most of the top NMFs. This song will be bothering you everywhere you go for the coming weeks, so you might as well get used to it.
However, as you scroll down the list, you can start to see which artist has made it onto lots of NMFs but has way less followers than other artists with a similar spread of adds. These are the ones to watch – if an artist with a (relatively) lower following has made it onto as many lists as, say, Beyoncé, then it’s a decent signal that either the humans of Spotify or their algorithms are placing a decent bet on them blowing up further. They don’t give these spaces away to just anyone, so making it onto multiple NMFs as a newer artist is a Big Hairy Deal.
(Of course, if you’re feeling snarky then you can enjoy yourself by looking at which multi-million follower artists didn’t make it onto as many lists as their peers. If that’s your sort of thing.)
Finally, you can also select multiple markets using the smaller table on the right (hold down Ctrl / Command and click on a few different list names). This will then filter the table on the left to only show adds across those markets. This might be handy if you only want to know who’s big in Asia, or in the UK and the US, or in Europe. No idea if that’s handy, but – again, if you’re a whopping great dork – it might be what you need.
Markets Tracked:
- US / Global (that’s the one just called ‘New Music Friday’)
- Australia
- Canada
- Deutschland (Germany)
- France
- Japan
- Korea
- Sweden
- UK
Caveats & Data Notes
- Sometimes the APIs go screwy and a playlist might not immediately pass its tracks through to my database (that’s why the “% Playlists” column is there, so you can still see who’s made it onto all of the lists that have worked fine).
- Sometimes Spotify does nutty things like update twice, or randomly change the URL for the playlists, which can wreak some havoc. I usually catch this, but sometimes weirdo behaviours slip though.
- Sometimes – and I have no idea how this even happens – the track ID for a song on Spotify changes, so the same song can appear on the list in two locations despite patently being the same bloody song. This can sometimes mean that a track appears to have been added to less lists than it actually has, instead appearing spread all over the charts like roadkill. Not a lot I can do about this one, and while it’s aggravating, it’s also pretty rare.