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 - 100,000 scale with the smallest artist at 0 and the biggest at 100,000.
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.'
Artist growth
The Soundcharts Artist Growth indicator measures how quickly an artist’s career is accelerating.
It compares the artist’s Soundcharts Score from the past 4 weeks with the previous 9 weeks. The change is then benchmarked against the standard deviation of other artists at the same career stage.
The result falls into one of five categories:
Explosive growth: 8× above the standard deviation
High growth: 2× above the standard deviation
Moderate growth: Above the standard deviation
Average growth: Around the standard deviation
Decline: Negative growth