05
The Cultural Mirror
Spotify assigns every artist a popularity score between 0 and 100.
Across the top artists in my listening record, those scores run from 35 to 95.
The 60-point spread is the finding.
Contrarian (pop ≤55)
5,837 plays
12.4%
Mid (pop 56–79)
18,885 plays
40.1%
Mainstream (pop ≥80)
22,348 plays
47.5%
Three artists below mainstream popularity
DJ Krush
40
Spotify popularity
2,356 plays
A Japanese turntablist who made abstract hip-hop instrumentals through the 90s and 2000s, largely unknown outside of a specific corner of the internet that no longer exists in its original form.
The Bug
35
Spotify popularity
1,759 plays
Kevin Martin's project sits somewhere between dancehall, grime, and industrial noise. It is not easy listening. It is not trying to be. This is probably the correct score for an artist who seems to actively resist being found.
Burial
51
Spotify popularity
1,722 plays
This one is slightly different — Burial has cultural cachet in certain circles, the kind of artist that gets referenced more than listened to. My 1,722 plays suggest otherwise.
The mainstream half
47.5% of the top plays go to artists with a popularity score of 80 or above.
There was no project to avoid the mainstream. The artists that accumulated the most plays are, for the most part, among the most-streamed on the planet. 832 plays of Kanye in a single year is not the behaviour of me optimising for rarity.
What the spread means
Most listening clusters. People find a register and stay in it — mainstream on one end, deliberately obscure on the other. A 60-point spread across the most-played artists doesn't indicate a curated identity. It indicates the absence of one (which is my happiest finding).
The Bug and Snoop Dogg in the same week. Probably the same day 🤷🏾♂️. The data doesn't find that inconsistent. Neither do I.
What the score can't reach
Popularity is a present-tense score. It reflects who is being listened to now, not who was being listened to when they were found. Clipse had a popularity of 65 when I looked them up in early 2026. In 2008, when the listen count was just beginning, they were a cult act. The score doesn't know that. It can't say whether you were early or late, whether you followed or led.
Across 17 years and 306,000 plays, the listening wasn't organised around what it was supposed to signal. The 60-point spread is just what that looks like as data.
The genres outside the system
There is a more interesting version of the contrarian finding. Not that I listened to obscure music consistently - I didn't, particularly. But that some of the genres in my library exist outside the frame the scoring system was built for.
Gqom is South African. Kuduro is Angolan. Tarraxinha is a Lisbon-Angolan and sometimes Mozambican hybrid that has been danced in every Maputo neighbourhood for 20 years. These aren't niche genres. They have massive audiences. The Spotify popularity score just wasn't built to measure a South African club scene or the Portuguese speaking diaspora in Europe. A score of 0 doesn't mean unknown. It means unmeasured.
This is different from being contrarian. A contrarian goes against the mainstream. These genres are simply from a different world than the one the metrics were built for — running in parallel, invisible to the infrastructure, present in my library for almost two decades.