How To HACK SPOTIFY'S POPULARITY SCORE

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What Is Spotify's Popularity Score?

Spotify has always been somewhat mysterious about how its algorithm works, and understanding your popularity score is crucial since most streams come from algorithmic placement these days. The problem is that it's really hard to see what's affecting your score.

That's changed thanks to a website called Musicstax.

Your popularity score isn't a chart position. Spotify has a top 500 chart measuring weekly streams, whereas your popularity score accumulates every stream, share, save, like, and playlist add, while subtracting skips and adding repeated listens from individual users. It's measured on a scale of 0-100 each day.

How Is Spotify's Popularity Score Determined

Spotify uses your popularity score to figure out enthusiasm towards your track rather than just raw listens. This matters because plenty of songs get listened to initially, then people realize they're bad and stop playing them.

This commonly happens when a washed-up artist drops something that charts high the first week because everyone wants to hear the crazy stuff he says, then streams fall off a cliff. The popularity score helps Spotify measure listener susceptibility to liking your tracks and their actual enthusiasm, since just knowing you like a song isn't as helpful as knowing how much you really like it. Spotify wants to promote songs that listeners will rinse repeatedly to keep them using the app.

Why Your Popularity Score Matters

You need a popularity score of around 25 to 35% to get into the Spotify algorithm, depending on the week, your genre, and how crowded it is. Hit that threshold, and you'll land on Discover Weekly and Release Radar.

It's also pretty rare to land an editorial playlist unless you're above 25%, which makes sense. Spotify needs people to keep listening to their playlists, and if people aren't susceptible to your track, they're going to skip it and drive down your popularity score. Nobody wins if they put your track on and it tanks.

What we see constantly is songs that get added to editorial playlists but don't perform well get dropped fast. You can usually see the popularity score dive if it's on a playlist, it doesn't match. Sometimes it's a bad fit, and the score goes back up after it's dropped. The song does better once it's off. Other times, it keeps going down because the only people who liked it were the artist's biggest fans.

The goal is getting that nice popularity score. Obviously, what matters most is if people like your song, but plenty of songs are good enough to get on playlists. What playlists do well, whether editorial or algorithmic, is deliver songs to users who are very likely to enjoy them because they follow that genre. Your mediocre song is never going to hit the most popular songs chart, but it can find tons of fans that change your life and set you up to grow into one of those chart artists as you mature and write better songs.

How Your Popularity Score Can Be Affected

Let's say you get added to a playlist called Dean's Playlist of Tunes to Pick Up Dive Bar Lizards To, which curates only the finest tunes Dean uses to get girls at his local dive bar to pretend they're in the movie Coyote Ugly and dance on the bar. What a lot of you don't realize is that getting on some playlists you pay for can actually knock down your score if the playlist is super diverse and has listeners who aren't feeling you. Those playlists can really knock down your popularity score by 10 to 15 points. If you've paid to be on one of those and it's driving your popularity score down, you could ask them to take you off.

Opening this each day as you do your promotions helps you understand how your popularity score is affected by the things you do. You can often see things like when artists do email blasts on the day their song comes out and really go hard on alerting the community of their new track by getting similar artists to post about it—you can see the popularity score go up faster because those are the people most likely to rinse the song.

But inversely, one of the funniest things I've seen for one of my consulting clients was what happened when an influencer friend posted their song, and that influencer's fans really didn't like the type of music they made. That song's popularity score was pretty much ruined for life.

Enjoying this? Forward it to a music friend you’d like to be closer to and start a discussion!

Using Musicstax to Monitor Your Popularity Score

Here's how to use Musicstax. Head over to Spotify and copy a link to the song you want to monitor, then paste that link into Musicstax. I'm using my personal song of the summer, Aries and Wyatt Otis's banger "Snake Eyes," which I've rinsed like a hundred times in the past two weeks and really driven up its popularity score.

You don't need to paste the link—you can search on Musicstax—but since it relies on Spotify's data for search, that can get tricky with small artists who have common names. Pasting ensures nothing goes wrong. If the song has never been looked up, it sometimes takes a second to generate the data. The site's free, so what do you expect?

Musicstax shows a ton of cool data, including key, tempo, and even loudness. But what we care about is that popularity score. Click on the popularity score, and now you can watch it grow, or maybe for some of you, shrink.

Some of you may have done this on Chartmetric, and that's correct, but Chartmetric is way too expensive for a lot of you, and this is a free site. Luke from Musicstax told me you'll soon be able to log in, favorite songs, and see a dashboard of every song you favorite, so this is just going to keep getting better. He's been improving the site for years, and honestly, I wouldn't be making this newsletter if he weren't such an angel for making this tool. He has a Buy Me a Coffee button on his website where you can thank him if you use this site a lot, and if you do, you really should, since he should be charging a monthly fee for this.

How to Drive Up Your Popularity Score

Tracking your popularity score daily gives you real insight into which promotional tactics actually move the needle and which ones are wasting your time or actively hurting your chances of algorithmic placement. The more you watch how different promotions affect your score, the better you'll understand what actually works for you versus what's just noise.