How to go viral in Spotify Trigger Cities

The music industry is structured to make pop stars bigger at the expense of upcoming artists. When an artist like Drake announces a forthcoming release on his Instagram handle (which has over 85 million followers), he gets hundreds of thousands of reposts from labels, influential athletes, colleagues, wannabees, fans, and blogs across the globe.

On the other hand, no new artist is showered such mouth-watering encomiums, even the ones who are signed to international labels. The music game is simply cutthroat.

For an upcoming artist to go viral on Spotify, he/she has to stand out among the pick-me crowd and journey into unconquered territories. They must employ affordable and reusable advertising tools to reach a more receptive audience.

At a time when many artists invested their resources on Facebook ads, Lil Nas X took a different path by combining elements of trap music with country music, and most importantly, he ventured into the then-unknown world, TikTok. The rest is history. That one single, Old Town Road, helped him attain viral popularity and a diamond certification in the States almost nine months later. Old Town Road spent nothing less than 19 weeks on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, a daunting feat for a new artist.

For the sake of this article, the uncharted waters are called triggered cities and the next ‘Lil Nas X’ is you! Now let’s go into some more details. In a recent report, Chartmetric published a list of cities with listeners who would jump on new sound regardless of genre. The trigger cities are also very receptive to upcoming artists. The juicy part of the report is that these trigger cities are cheaper to target with ads compared to other hubs. Once reception and competition have been catered for, the remaining tion-factor required for an artist to go viral on Spotify is listener’s retention. The only way to retain your listeners is to release a song with high replay value. We assume that is not an issue in your case.

The Spotify streaming landscape is currently experiencing a demographic change as the Swedish platform bags more global music subscribers. Spotify users are consciously and unconsciously creating algorithmic playlists and viral trends in regions where a good number of artists are not targeting. Traction from these regions can increase your Spotify Popularity Index and get you into playlists with millions of active followers.

The rule of thumb in music marketing used to be to target areas with the most premium subscribers. The reason is that streams from cities filled with premium subscribers get a higher payout from Spotify to artists compared to streams from cities populated by free users (Spotify users who use the ad-supported tier). However, this method leaves a lot of money on the table and restricts the reach of the artist. Budding artists would get a better chance of going viral if they advertised more to trigger cities.

Here, gold that does not glitter does not get clicks, opps barely attract, what goes around would most likely get lost in endless social media feeds, and of course, quantity will always displace quality from the charts. Isn’t it a strange world?

When it comes to the Spotify algorithm, the number of plays is one of the factors it considers before recommending a track. 

Having 2000 plays from 400 premium subscribers does not have more algorithmic effect than 200,000 plays from 50,000 free listeners. The algorithm, as a non-human tastemaker, only focuses on finding the right music for the right audience and it requires a significant amount of stream data to recommend your track. The more plays you get in the first week of your release, the easier it is to get playlisted on Spotify.

Latin America takes the lead

The Chartmetric study was based on data from two of the world’s most visited platforms for audio and video streaming – Spotify and YouTube. For the sake of this guide, the Spotify data will be our point of focus. Spotify, unlike YouTube, gets most of its monthly listeners (criteria for determining Spotify app/web activity per user) from Latin America, the USA, and Western Europe. The USA and Western Europe Cities do not fall under the trigger cities. Why? The cost of advertisement is high in those regions plus they might not be really receptive to upcoming talents since all eyes are on the established artists due to the Hollywood effect.

To get a better view of what trigger cities look like, we need to analyze YouTube views by city. The only similarity between the Spotify and YouTube lists is that Mexico, a Latin American trigger city, retained its number one spot. The YouTube list is dominated by Latin American and Asian cities. The top ten cities on the YouTube list perfectly describe the idea of trigger cities. The top ten trigger cities include Mexico City, Bangkok, Bogota, Lucknow, Santiago, Patna, Lima, Pune, Sao Paulo, and Indore.

USA and UK cities struggled to make the YouTube list, as New York debuted at number 23. Latin American cities such as Mexico, Santiago, and Sao Paulo made the top ten lists on both Spotify and YouTube.

The Darwin Effect: The need to evolve to survive in the global music industry

According to Charles Darwin’s original thoughts on natural selection, only ‘the fittest’ get to survive the storms that nature presents from time to time. The organisms that do not adapt get wiped out during food scarcity or a natural disaster. The global music industry operates by this law. Not every rapper who makes it to XXL Freshman Class will stay relevant in the next decade.

While the Chartmetric report hailed the ability of listeners from Trigger Cities to anoint the next global superstars, it questioned the depth of transcontinental cultural reception. Every musical genre evolves from a particular culture, for instance, rap has its roots in black American culture and activism. However, artists who are able to transcend genre or combine elements from different cultures would amass millions of streams in a short amount of time.

A good example is Jason Derulo. His recent feature on Tesher’s song titled Jalebi Baby Remix got over 16 million streams on YouTube within a week. Jason’s ability to blend his dance-pop style with Asian fusion made the song an instant hit. A feature from an artist who is already established in the targeted region will also increase the reception of the listeners in the chosen trigger cities.

Final Thoughts

Even though some of the US/Western Europe cities with high activity on the Spotify music app are not classified as trigger cities, artists can still bank on Latin American cities alongside their home cities for streams during their first week of release, as this period will determine the success of the track on Spotify. Remember, it is stream quantity, not quality will get you into the essential Spotify algorithmic playlists.