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: Taylor Swift
Zero surprises here, with tracks from her new album Midnights left all the big NMFs absolutely covered in Swift. Not only was “Anti-Hero” featured on all nine, but “Snow on The Beach” also made it onto six of them, “Lavender Haze” made it onto four, and “Vigilante Shit” onto three. The most-streamed album in one day ever, and literally no-one is surprised.
🚀 The Challenger: Fred again..
It was a tough week to even make it onto the NMFs, given that all of the spots were taken up by Tay-Tay. This makes it all the more impressive that Fred Again..’s “Delilah (pull me out of this)” made it onto all nine of the big ones. With the All-Nine Club this week featuring some whopping artists like Shakira, Arctic Monkeys, and Ellie Goulding, for this artist to get this sort of backing across the board is notable.
🥊 Punching Above: Rosa Linn
With just-barely a six-figure Spotify following, Rosa Linn’s collab with Duncan Lawrence “WDIA (Would Do It Again)” did spectacularly well to make it onto eight of the big nine lists. This looks less surprising though when you look outside of Spotify and find viral TikTok songs, a Eurovision appearance, and some upcoming supports for Ed Sheeran dates in North America. She’s on a mission to have Armenian artists become more widely seen and heard – seems on track to me.
🧛♂️ New Blood: Naliya
Rounding out the week, Naliya – with a mere 2k followers – strode onto a whopping seven of the big nine lists this week with “Pangea“. While it does features blackbear, who adds some follower heft, this is still a brilliant show of support for this emerging artist.