Who was the world’s biggest songwriter in 2020?
It’s not an easy question to answer, thanks to all the fun variables of the songwriting world – not least the fact that multiple writers are often credited with different slices of new hit songs every week.
Music rights data platform Blokur believes it’s come up with a good solution.
The company, which says it works with 70% of the music publishing sector – including the likes of Universal Music Group – has launched a new set of annual charts showing the most popular songwriters on streaming services last year.
Before publishing its full set of charts within a report next week, Blokur has passed MBW the highlights, which we’ll be running over the next few days.
The methodology behind these charts, which you can read in full through here, is obviously important.
Using Blokur’s database, songwriters were ranked according to their share of each song and the popularity of the song in the Spotify, Apple, Amazon and YouTube charts.
Song popularity was based on the number of days in 2020 each song appeared in each platform’s flagship chart: (i) Spotify’s Global Top 200; (ii) Apple’s Global Top 100; (iii) Amazon’s all genre Top 200; (iv) YouTube’s Top 100 Global Weekly chart.
Songwriter share information was then pulled from Blokur’s database for the Top 100 most popular songs in 2020 on each platform.
Finally, a score for each songwriter was created using the following formula:
Today (July 5), MBW can reveal the overall chart – covering the four aforementioned streaming service charts (Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube), for which Blokur has given equal weighting.
The results follow below.
The first chart here reveals the top songwriters (including songwriter-artists) from last year on streaming services, while the chart underneath reveals the list of most successful songwriters who didn’t feature as an artist on the tracks that made the relevant annual charts.
As you can see, the biggest songwriter according to Blokur’s methodology was Tones and I – aka Toni Watson – who wrote 100% of her massive global smash, Dance Monkey.
The fact Watson wrote 100% of the song is, in Blokur’s methodology, obviously a key factor in her taking the top spot.
Dance Monkey, originally released in May 2019, has racked up over 2.2 billion plays on Spotify to date, while its official YouTube video has over 1.6 billion views.
Tones and I signed to Warner Chappell Music as a songwriter in August 2019.
If MBW readers would like to receive Blokur’s full 2020 songwriters report when it launches next week, you can leave your relevant details over here. Music Business Worldwide