Every week, my robots scour the biggest nine New Music Friday playlists in the world to see whose getting backed hard by the big green machine. This week:
🏆 The Champ: Linkin Park
Ahead of the 20 year anniversary re-release of Meteora, Linkin Park’s previously-unreleased track from 2002 “Lost” jumped straight onto all nine of the biggest NMFs, making them the artist with the largest following (~23m) to do so.
🚀 The Challenger: Jessie Murph
YouTube-then-TikTok star Jessie Murph also managed to make it onto the big nine this week with “What Happened To Ryan” – no mean feat given there were a larger than usual number of Nine Club members this week. Given the competition at the top, Murph did particularly well to make it onto all of them.
🥊 Punching Above: Mae Stephens
Mae Stephens’ bouncy, wonky “If We Ever Broke Up” made it onto eight of the big NMFs this week, after months of build-up (and extensive use as a sound) on TikTok. Now signed to Universal and with the song fully out in the world, this new artist is getting support across the big markets from Spotify. Stephens’ follower count is literally hundreds of thousands lower than the next artist to get onto eight or nine of these lists, a signal that someone’s betting on bigger things to come.
🧛♂️ New Blood: Glockenbach
Glockenback may be the act with the smallest follower count to make it onto multiple NMFs this week (~16k followers, five NMFs), but the team behind “YEAH” (Joel Corry, Tenchi, ClockClock) are a supergroup power team of European EDM stars , with oodles of nominations, chart hits, streams and accolades between them. It’ll be interesting to see if they keep growing this project into something approaching the already-impressive sum of their parts.
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📸 Glockenbach by Annika Yanura