I have recently presented a contribution in the with Francisco Pedroche on rankings. We have particularized to Spotify. While people around the world stopped, music didn’t: we have shown that during the worst months of the pandemic, the list of the Top-200 hits on Spotify, produced from the streams registered on the popular app, had 18% more songs. The most played songs worldwide, during the months studied, were Dance Monkey (Tones and I), Blinding Lights (The Weeknd), and The Box (Roddy Ricch).
This means that, regardless of whether record companies published new material or not, listeners changed their preferences more often during the pandemic, thus causing an increase in the number of songs that made the lists. Thus, the first quarter of 2019 registered 474 songs on the Top 200 list, whereas in the same period of this year, the number of hits was 557, which represents an 18% increase. This figure reveals a significant increase when compared to the 1% decrease that took place during the same period from 2018 to 2019, or the 9% increase from 2017 to 2018.
Some links to the news on this paper: MUSIC NEWS, TIME24, La Vanguardia, and ABC.
