What does the Popular tracks on an artist page mean? How is it calculated?

[merijn2]

I recently started to browse the artist's pages on Spotify, especially finding out what artists are popular and what artists are less popular than I thought. I am also looking at the lists of popular songs, but I can't find out what it means to be a popular track. It doesn't correspond strictly to most played tracks, and when a track is recently released (the last few months or so) it often tops the list of popular tracks. Browsing this forum I see that people say the list is based on an algorhithm, that also includes things like how often the song is shared in addition to how often it is played, and it is also designed to skew towards recent songs. My question is basically, how recent do songs have to be to get a boost by this algorhithm, because I have seen a couple of times that songs from 2015 or 2016 are more popular than I would expect, but maybe my expectations are wrong.

[MattSuda · Accepted solution]

Hey @merijn2

The info that I found is that the songs that appear under Popular on a Spotify artist page are automatically updated every 24 hours and ranked based on their number of all-time streams and their number of recent streams.

Since Spotify does not make the full algorithm details available to the public, I'm not sure how much recent has an impact and how recent it has to be, but I think the algorithm keeps it pretty balanced.

[merijn2]

Thank you! That means that one or more of the following three things are true:

1) I am getting old, and the fact that for instance I didn't know some songs by Coldplay of 2015 and 2016 that are very popular says something about me, not about how popular they are. I think this is probably most likely to be true.

2) The afterglow of releases is much longer than I thought it was. I'd imagine that after a couple of months a new song is not a hit anymore and the number of plays sort of settles, but maybe your average new song remains more popular than older songs for much longer, say at least a year.

3) the way most popular songs are calculated means that even songs that were popular a year ago are still more likely to rank as a popular song than songs that had their peak say 5 years ago.

[MattSuda]

You're welcome!