Music + Fitness: Shaping Up Spotify and Deezer’s Top Workout Playlists

HighlightsPeloton’s recent IPO has us wondering about the most popular fitness playlists on Spotify and Deezer, so slap on some cross-trainers and fire up those Bluetooth earbuds.

Mission    Good morning, it’s Jason here at Chartmetric with your 3-minute Data Dump where we upload charts, artists, and playlists into your brain so you can stay up on the latest in the music data world.
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DateThis is your Data Dump for Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2019.

Music + Fitness: Shaping Up Spotify and Deezer’s Top Workout Playlists Peloton, the indoor fitness brand best associated with its high-energy, online-class guided cycling experiences, went public on Oct. 7th, but closed its first day 11% under its initial public offering price, according to CNN.
Competitor SoulCycle pulled out of IPO-ing last year, and maybe it has something to do with the music issues Peloton is now facing: a $300M lawsuit from a group of music publishers.
Whether they’re using IP legitimately or not, there’s a lot at stake when it comes to music’s intimate relationship to fitness, according to music/tech journalist Cherie Hu’s latest newsletter.
And it’s definitely illustrated by Spotify’s most popular workout playlists, six of which are in the Top 100 in terms of Follower count: Beast Mode is the most popular context-based fitness playlist on the Swedish platform, and the 9th most followed overall at 6.5M Followers. Post Malone is currently getting the most unique monthly listeners from four playlist slots he’s currently sitting in, acquiring 891K MLs.
Reggaeton king J Balvin and American DJ/producer Marshmello are in the #2 and #3 slots with 592K and 577K Beast Mode-specific MLs respectively.
Almost 20% of the current list is tagged as EDM, and more than 30% if you include Brostep.
More than half of the current list are American artists, with the second most-represented country being high-energy Dutch electronic artists like Armin van Buuren, Hardwell and R3HAB...but still comprising only 13% of the list.

Spotify’s Motivation Mix at 4.4M Followers and the simply-titled Workout playlist at 3.3M are the next most popular fitness lists there, but an interesting juxtaposition may be Deezer’s most popular fitness playlist, Rock Workout.

That’s right: the #1 list to work out to on the French streaming platform is based around the rock genre, which is very different from Spotify’s top workout mixes, which are usually hip-hop, pop or dance-based.
Rock Workout has 342K fans and currently a 70-track count, compared to Beast Mode’s 200 track count.
Up until mid-May this year, Beast Mode only held 50 tracks at once, and though the amount of slots open up in the playlist, they do a great job of keeping things fresh, with a 100% 28-day ratio, meaning that the entire list has changed in the past month.
With Rock Workout, only 3% of the list has changed in the past month, even though it’s less than ¼ of Beast Mode’s track count, featuring artists such as Linkin Park, Nickelback and AC/DC.
Other Deezer workout playlists like Rap & Sport and Motivation Hits at 324K fans each feature much of the same pop/hip-hop/EDM fare you may expect...but it just goes to show that not all sweat beads to the same drummer.

Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.
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