Weekly Music Data Report: August 15-30

At Wavo, we track streaming performance for the top 90,000 artists on Spotify. This data can provide a snapshot of popular music and help to address some persisting questions, like which artists are on the rise and deserve extra attention? And what’s responsible for their growth? For this reason, we put together the following charts.

1. Fastest growing artists

This chart shows the artists who experienced the greatest relative growth in Spotify Monthly Listeners between August 15th and 30th. 

Dutch electronic music duo Bassjackers had a busy summer. In July, they released “Snatch” and played the wildly-popular EDM festival Tomorrowland. They also released a music video for “Mortal Kombat Theme,” which will appear on the soundtrack for the latest installment of the long-running video game franchise.

Veteran R&B producer and singer Raphael Saadiq released his first solo album since 2011, "Jimmy Lee," along with two official music videos on August 23rd. Lo-fi beatsmith HM Surf's five-song summer EP "Porch Life," clocking in at just over eight minutes, helped pushed them within reach of 1M fans.

2. Artists who gained the most monthly followers

This chart shows the artists who experienced the greatest absolute change in Spotify Monthly Listeners over the same August 15-30th date range. As expected, the chart is occupied by some of the most popular artists in the world right now—i.e., those who are capable of gaining between 2M and 10M new Spotify fans over a two-week period.

Newcomers Social House and Lil Tecca are riding a massive wave of popularity due to their viral songs "Boyfriend (with Ariana Grande)" and "Ransom," respectively. Former Fifth Harmony singer Normani released "Motivation" on August 16th, a day after our reporting began. In 2018, she became the fastest solo artist (without an album) to surpass one billion combined streams on Spotify.

This post originally appeared in Wavo’s Weekly Stat email.