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How are Soundcharts Scores and Career Stages calculated?

Aymeric Gibon avatar
Written by Aymeric Gibon
Updated over 2 months ago

Artist score

The Soundcharts Artist Score is designed to measure an artist’s influence and momentum. It allows you to quickly assess an artist’s industry standing with a single, powerful score.

The Soundcharts Artist Score is built from two key factors:

  • Fanbase Score – Measures an artist’s total following across social media and streaming platforms, with fair weighting to avoid bias.

  • Trending Score – Tracks growth over the last 7 days, including key metrics like Spotify Monthly Listeners.​

The overall Soundcharts Artist Score is a weighted average of these two scores. All three numbers are then converted to fit on a logarithmic 0 - 100 scale with the smallest artist at 0 and the biggest at 100.

Song score

​Since we only have data for the streaming era, we have no way to compute the "all time biggest songs" - as a result, the Soundcharts Song Score only reflects the song's growth in listening metrics over the last 7 days.

Career stage​

Once Soundcharts Artist Scores are calculated, we use it to rank all artists.

The Career Stages of an artist depends on where they land in that ranking:

  • The top 0.03% of artists (with up-to-date metadata) are classified as 'Superstar'

  • The next 0.2% as 'Mainstream'

  • The following 1% as 'Developing'

  • The remainder as 'Long-tail.'

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