Rising to the Top: What makes an artist popular on Spotify?
By: Ilias Paraskevopoulos
Tags: Spotify, Spotify Playlist, Spotify Marketing, Artist Marketing, Music Marketing

Introduction

What are the drivers of artist popularity on Spotify? For the past two months, I have been working on this research question in the context of my thesis for Tilburg University’s Msc in Marketing Management.

As part of the thesis, I try to find how different variables can possibly affect Spotify’s popularity score (y). My predictors are: artist popularity metrics in other streaming platforms (x1); playlist reach, meaning the number of non-unique listeners reached through all playlists who feature an artist (x2); playlist count, meaning the number of playlists that feature an artist (x3); artist gender (x4); artist country of origin (x5); press contact, that is, if an artist publishes press contact info on the web (x6); booking agent, that is, if an artist invests in such an agent (x7); and whether an artist collaborates with a major vs indie label (x8). The model is summarized in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Conceptual Model

Managerial relevance behind the Research Question

Behind this conceptual model there is a core business meaning. Artists in reality are entrepreneurs, and their business assets can propel them to succeed in their career endeavors. Popularity is a crucial asset because it attracts sales, gigs, album creations, views, and drives expansion to an artist’s activities. Popularity can decide whether an artist can earn a living from music and further develop musically or not. Importantly, it is the current industry landscape of the streaming platforms where artists must adapt and get to play the game. By asking what drives Spotify’s popularity score I seek to find actionable insights that can help musicians.

Method

Here is how it happened. I got a dataset of 51k artists from Chartmetrics, a music data analytics platform whose platform my Uni has access to. Due to an extremely high number of missing values per variable and an inability to interpolate the missings, I implemented listwise deletion resulting in around 700 artists with full info on all the variables I wanted to assess. As for the type of model employed, after testing quality indicators of different models, I rejected a log-log regression analysis and moved forward with an OLS multiple regression. This provided the highest model quality possible.

Results, Insight & Learning Points

The results were very interesting. Looking at the plots from Figure 2, we observe an exponential graphical shape between Spotify’s popularity score and playlist reach, and also between Spotify’s popularity score and playlist count. The graphical shape between Spotify’s popularity score and different popularity metrics from other platforms (Deezer, Twitch) seems to be exponential too. Youtube’s subscriber and views ranks though show a more linear relationship.

Figure 2: Popularity Score x Playlist Reach, Playlist Count, Popularity Metrics

When all the predictors are added to the regression model, all these six variables mentioned above have a positive significant relationship with Spotify’s popularity score. This means that if an artist has a high score in one of these variables then it is likely for Spotify’s popularity score to be high as well, controlling for all the other predictors. Therefore if you are popular in Spotify’s competitor Deezer, Youtube Music, or even Twitch a video-streaming platform, then you will most likely be popular in Spotify too.

Regarding artists' gender, as we see in previous research, there is a gender gap between female and male artists in the music industry, with females consisting of around 20% of all artists. This number is very solid as it is frequently observed in multiple and independent researches on the topic. In my data, I get approximately the same percentage number. On the other hand, while past research is conflicting on whether male artists are favored, my data suggest that Spotify does not discriminate between men over women in terms of popularity. Indeed, the results suggest that gender does not affect Spotify's popularity score in a significant way.

As per artists’ country of origin, while my hypothesis was that artists from North American and European countries would be more popular in comparison to artists from other countries since Spotify has a heavier market presence in Western countries, I find that there is no significant relationship between artist country of origin and Spotify’s popularity score.

Regarding press contact and booking agent, it is interesting to find that they do not affect significantly Spotify’s popularity score. Even if an artist employs a booking agent, and has publicly stated his or her press contact, it ultimately seems to not matter. This contradicts previous research finding correlations between booking agents and artist networking and other valuable artist assets. My model suggests there might be a different kind of mechanism with regards to popularity in the context of the new industry landscape of digital platforms like Spotify.

As expected, artists who collaborate with major labels significantly outperform artists who go with indie labels. This expands the theory arguing that it is not only more sales but also more popularity that goes with major label collaboration.

In a Nutshell

So, if I had to sum up, what is in there for musicians? First, to understand that the road to achieving popularity is paved with exponential stairs. That being a female or coming from a certain country should not be a discourager from pursuing a music career. That musicians shouldn’t bother writing down their press contact as Spotify encourages, and that investing in a booking agent doesn’t pay off with regards to Spotify, so arranging gigs individually can help as well. Lastly, continuing to aim at collaborations with major labels still remains key.