Believe it or not, it's only been a week since Jason’s Global House took us on an excitingly eclectic rave around the world. While overseas travel may be limited right now, this week we’ve refreshed detectd with a chill and relaxing blend of both local and international R&B artists. Our current circumstances may be rather strange and unprecedented but we will get through this — and music has always helped bring us together.

Listen to this week's detectd on your favorite streaming platform here.

Before we dive into the Chartmetric side of things, I just want to quickly shout out COLORS, one of my favorite YouTube music channels. Detectd is as much about making use of Chartmetric data as it is about highlighting up and coming artists, and ever since I discovered COLORS, it has become one of my favorite places to discover new music.

This week is a sort of COLORS x Chartmetric collab, if you will. I’ve watched (and listened to!) loads of COLORS videos and thought it would be fun, using Chartmetric, to also check out how these burgeoning artists are doing data-wise.

COLORS showcases a lot of R&B tracks, and I think we could all do with some smooth and soulful music right now. I started things off by adding all of the COLORS R&B artists I could find in the last year (2019) to my Chartmetric Dashboard, cross-checking my listening with the genre tags listed under Genres on each artist’s page before clicking the + Follow button.

That process had me following 24 amazing up-and-comers, but we're looking to curate a playlist of about 10-15 artists here, so let's see what else we can do. Navigating to my Dashboard lets me see all of the artists’ stats together on the same page, and a quick glance over the numbers shows that a Spotify Popularity Index (SPI) range of around 60 to 70 (out of 100) occurs more often than not. This tells me that while they've got traction on the platform, they're still somewhat "under the radar," which is exciting.

We can further narrow things down by easily cross-checking these SPIs with another metric like ... Spotify Monthly Listeners (MLs) maybe? Hey, it looks like we can actually create a shortlist of artists that have both an SPI ranging from around 60 to 70 and also a ML range of approximately 1 to 3 million. By adding on MLs as a second filter, I can start to really understand how wide of an audience these artists are attracting, and to a certain degree, their playlist exposure, since that's such a big contributor to this metric on Spotify.

That actually leaves us with a solid dozen chill artists to support on this week’s playlist. Hopefully, these relaxing beats help take the edge off of any worries and uncertainty. We'll check in again next week to make sure you're still feeling more rhythm than blues.

Listen to this week's detectd on your favorite streaming platform here.