So why should you use Your Hit Momentum Report?
After all, there already are a variety of ways to know what’s big on streaming. You can see Spotify’s Top 200 right now for free.
The problem is that the songs with the most plays on streaming are rarely the songs that the most people actually know and love.
The key words here are “plays” and “people”
Raw streaming data doesn’t show how many different people play a song. It shows how many times people played that song:
- If one person plays a song 100 times, it counts as 100 plays
- If ten people play a song ten times, it counts as 100 plays
- If 100 people play a song once, it counts as 100 plays
That’s a fundamental difference from old-fashioned record sales and iTunes downloads, which measured how many individual people bought a song. You might play a song hundreds of times after you bought it. Your purchase still counted as one vote.
In radio, we don’t need songs a few fans play repeatedly. We need songs that lots of listeners know and love.
Artist Stans vs. Casual Fans
So why is measuring plays instead of people a problem?
When a big song releases new material, that artist’s die-hard fans flock to their favorite streaming service to binge those new songs. They often repeatedly play every song on a new album—driving up those raw play counts and pushing numerous songs from an album to the top of the streaming charts.
We call these super fans Artist Stans.
While those select few super-fans are playing new releases on repeat, the vast majority of your listeners don’t even know these songs, let alone like them.
Eventually, a select few songs will become popular with a whole lot more people than an artist’s biggest fans. They’ll become the kind of mass appeal hit that entire stadiums sing along with between innings. They’ll become the song folks sing along with at the supermarket. They’ll become the songs that top callout research for months.
We call the rest of the song’s fan base Casual Fans.
While Artist Stans rack up total plays on streaming when a song is new, they ultimately comprise a small minority of a song’s fan base if that song becomes a real hit.
Meanwhile, Casual Fans might take weeks—even months—to discover a song. They never play it repeatedly the way Artist Stans do, either. However, those Casual Fans comprise the vast majority of people who ultimately know and love a hit song. Those casual fans also keep playing a song… sometimes for months… sometimes for years.
If you want to use streaming data to find which songs lots of your listeners know and love, you have to separate the songs that are only big with Artist Stans from the songs that have attracted Casual Fans.
Momentum: The Key to Finding the Real Hits in Streaming
After analyzing thousands of songs’ streaming patterns and comparing those patterns to songs that became mass-appeal hits, we discovered that the real hits aren’t necessarily the songs with the most plays on streaming this week; they’re the songs fans keep streaming week after week.
We call this metric Momentum and it’s at the heart of Your Hit Momentum Report.
While the algorithm that measures a song’s Momentum is complex (we had to use A.I. to calculate it), the concept is simple: If people try a song on streaming and they love it, they’ll keep playing it. If people try a song and hate it, they’ll abandon it quickly.
Our algorithm for gauging a song’s stickiness is the Momentum IndexSM. Here’s what it tells you:
Streaming Data that Tracks a Song from Debut to Recurrent
Back before streaming, we only knew when someone bought music. We had no idea what they kept playing or weeks, months, or years. We had no idea which CDs ended up at Goodwill.
With streaming, we finally know how fans interact with their favorite songs at every stage of a song’s life cycle.
Your Hit Momentum Report can often identify songs that will become major mass appeal hits weeks—or even months—before traditional passive research can confirm it.
Your Hit Momentum Report can also spot which songs listeners are finally growing tired of hearing—and the songs listeners really do still want to hear for years.
The Math is Complex. The Report is Simple.
Behind the scenes, Your Hit Momentum Report does a lot of complex math to find the hits Casual Fans know and love. You’ll never have to understand any of it. Your Hit Momentum Report gives you a simple, easy to understand ranker of the key data about each song.
Your Hit Momentum Report is as easy to use as a callout report. Perhaps even easier.
Take a Look for Yourself
Our founder, Matt Bailey, will happily give you a personal tour of Your Hit Momentum Report, so you can decide if it makes sense for your station.