The top five music artists worldwide in February may not have changed since the previous month, but there has been a good deal of shifting around in the lower ranks of the top 50.
NEW IN THIS MONTH’S WORLDWIDE TOP 50
With almost 340,000 unique file sharers, Future jumped to number 16 after releasing two new albums last month. As of February 14, an average of roughly 10,000 file sharers downloaded his files each day. When he released his self-titled album “Future” on February 17, these numbers increased to over 40,000 that same day and later peaked again with the release of “Hndrxx” on February 24 and 25, reaching more than 50,000 file sharers on each day.
Another popular artist with an album release in February? Big Sean, the second new arrival in the top 50. He released “I Decided” on February 3, which prompted the daily number of file sharers to multiply by a factor of almost 10, from 4,800 on February 2 to 43,000 on February 4 – a jump that snagged him rank 19 for February.
Migos also joined the top 50 in February at number 26. Meanwhile, Deep Purple ranked 39 and Michael Jackson stayed alive at 42.
MORE WINNERS IN FEBRUARY
MAROON 5
Taking into account that February only has 28 days compared with January’s 31, the number of consumers sharing files of Maroon 5 increased by an impressive 32,000, which moved the artists up 6 positions to rank 37.
THE CHAINSMOKERS
The Chainsmokers have been getting more and more popular around the world in recent months. Throughout most of 2015, the daily number of file sharers barely reached the 1,000 mark. But by the end of the year, their popularity had started to grow – slowly at first. With almost every new track and album released in 2016, the duo steadily began conquering the file sharing charts (see infographic). When “Don’t Let Me Down” dropped in May, the number of file sharers jumped to 13,400. Then on September 29, “All We Know” kicked those numbers up to 25,600 per day. But the Chainsmokers didn’t reach their all-time high (so far) of 30,000 until February 23 – one day after they performed “Something Just Like This” with Coldplay at the BRIT awards. With that, the duo moved from position 19 to 15 in February and are currently most popular in the U.S., India, the Philippines, Brazil and Canada.
ED SHEERAN
Ed Sheeran reached his own record in 2016 on January 16 with 26,200 file sharers. After that, his numbers fell and fluctuated between 15,000 and 10,000 from March until end of the year. On January 7 of this year, the daily number of file sharers doubled from about 10,000 to more than 20,000 and since then have been increasing continuously, peaking at 37,000 on February 24. This increasing popularity is mirrored in his chart ranking: Ed Sheeran climbed from 15 to 8 in February.
REGIONAL CHARTS
Similar to February’s top positions on the worldwide charts, there was not much movement on the regional charts in Asia and Europe or on U.S. country charts. Nevertheless, there were some visible changes at the city level (see infographic).
Source: TECXIPIO
Definition: The rankings are based on the number of unique file sharers: How many peers shared at least one file of the respective music artist in February 2017?