Kenyan Artists popularity using Spotify data

Published in

Analytics Vidhya

5 min readJun 25, 2021

Spotify, a music streaming service owned by Swedish entrepreneur Daniel E.K recently brought its services to Kenya. Even though it has been in existence since 2006 it was only until recently that music lovers in our country could access it, other than those that know what a VPN is lol.

Data science is a new field in the tech industry that involves fetching data from various sources and analyzing that data. As a data scientist and music lover having recently found out about Spotify and it’s API that allows us to fetch artist data I decided to put on my data scientist hat and my ear phones to analyze one of my favorite music genres, Kenyan Music, this is what I found out.

Followers

Highest Followers 😎

Just like other social sites Spotify allows users to follow users and artists alike. On the top of the todem pole is non other than the four man boy band SAUTI SOL with 167,267 followers 👏👏👏 In second place is Mr WAVY himself KALIGRAPH JONES with 53,773 👏👏 OTILE BROWN, NYASHINSKI, and H_ART the BAND make up the remaining top five positions.

Here’s the list of the top 10, WAKADINALI being the surprise inclusion in the list at ninth and WILLY PAUL in tenth

Lowest Followers 🥴

On the bottom of the heap with artists with the least followers but definitely not the least talent. MISS P tops the list with 153 followers with the new star on the block HAPPY C, the index 001 hit star, with the least number of followers, just 8. Surprisingly in the list is noughties female pop star AVRIL with just 113 followers and two Sauti Sol boys SAVARA and BIEN in the list as well. These guys should really try to improve their followers count as more followers = more listens.

Popularity

Spotify ranks musicians popularity from a scale of 1–100, with 100 being the most popular, this is calculated from the popularity of all artist’s tracks. So basically they take all the artist’s songs popularity add them and find the mean value from a range of 1–100

Lets see who topped the list

Most popular 😎

Again! Sauti Sol tops the list with a popularity rate of 53 . Well done Sauti Sol, their proteges Bensoul and Nviiri The Storyteller came in second and third. Sol Generation taking over the Kenyan music scene

Most popular and artists with the most followers SAUTISOL

Listen to Sauti Sol on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/artist/4Rj9lQm9oSiMlirgpsM6eo

Songs

Spotify gives us different song attributes like

A song’s Danceability
Energy,
length, liveness and
loudness , let’s look at a few

Danceability 💃

At number one position or pole position for the strippers out there, pun intended, with the highest score in danceability, drum rolls please 🥁🥁 STRETCHMARKS KWA HAGA!!! LIL MAINA’s new hit comes in first with a danceability score of 0.95 out of 1 🔥🔥🔥.Number two in the danceability score Boutross YEA YEA YEA comes in second with a score of 0.93 tieing with Pandemik also with a 0.93

Check out the scores below

Listen to Stretchmarks Kwa Haga on Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/track/19typQ3WrdX17WF0QRDS5u?si=de7713955d12423d

Energy 🔥

In the energy category in a surprise turn of events, at least for me, Kamati ya Roho Chafu by Bien(Sauti Sol) and Willy Paul tops the energy score list with a score of 0.87, MISSED CALL by BREEDER LW is tied for first together with SHAMRA SHAMRA by Mbuzi Gang also with a score of 0.87.

Listen to Breeder LWs Missed Call on Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/track/4RAHERsvTGgzHNXbmJL198?si=484f161f90334897

popularity 🏆

The popularity of a track. The value will be between 0 and 100, with 100 being the most popular.
The popularity of a track is a value between 0 and 100, with 100 being the most popular. The popularity is calculated by algorithm and is based, in the most part, on the total number of plays the track has had and how recent those plays are. So the more the plays a song gets and how recent those plays are the higher the popularity score.

And fittingly the song I am listening to right now as I write this article NIKO SAWA - NVIIRI the STORYTELLER ft BIEN(SAUTI SOL) comes in first with a popularity score of 51, Dusuma by OTILE BROWN comes in second with MY EVERYTHING by SAUTI SOL also coming in second with a 46 popularity score.

Genres

GENGETONE!! Continued to top charts with artists like BOUTROSS, kings of gengetone ETHIC, MASAUTI, BREEDER LW, I want hit star CHRIS KAIGA, FEMI ONE and KAHU$H topping different playlist charts. Kenyan pop and Azontobeats were also among the most listened to Kenyan genres on Spotify with different country’s music like Nigerian, Ugandan, Tanzanian and Rwandan music also popping up in Kenyan playlists.