question about the popularity score of an artist

[tech_freak748393]

My Question or Issue

i want to create a list of the most interesting artists in germany, and i thought i could use the popularity score to do that. i cant figure out if the popularity score is global or could also be retrieved for a local market? 

additionally i wanted to ask if someone knows how the popularity score is calculated (i know its based on the popularity of tracks but if someone has more in depth knowledge it would be great!

[Ximzend]

Copied from API reference pages:
"The artist's popularity is calculated from the popularity of all the artist's tracks." - https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/get-an-artist
"The popularity is calculated by algorithm and is based, in the most part, on the total number of plays the track has had and how recent those plays are.
Generally speaking, songs that are being played a lot now will have a higher popularity than songs that were played a lot in the past. Duplicate tracks (e.g. the same track from a single and an album) are rated independently. Artist and album popularity is derived mathematically from track popularity. Note: the popularity value may lag actual popularity by a few days: the value is not updated in real time." - https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/get-several-tracks

[NADRIP]

Of course that language is rather vague, since "derived mathematically" doesn't even indicate what mathematical operations are being performed?  Are the song popularity scores, for instance, added then divided against the score of the performer with the highest total result?  Or are the song popularity scores averaged?  And is the whole set of songs used or might some songs be dismissed during these mathematical operations?  That language essentially tells us nothing.  There could even be (I doubt there is of course) a random number generated as part of the equation and it would still be "mathematical" technicaly.

Pursuing this same question it's important to note that there always seems to be a song (or multiple songs) and a performer with a score of 100 on the popularity indexes, and that highest rated song or performer is part of the scale by which all other songs or performers are measured.

I happened on a statistical analysis that was done in 2018, and what they indicated was their best interpretation of what Spotify was saying at the time is that artist popularity is ultimately an additive total of the popularity indexes of all that performer's songs, which is then compared to the additive total of the popularity indexes of whatever performer on Spotify has the highest additive total (and thus has an artist popularity of 100).

There also seems to be some kind of logarithmic curve applied, since I've seen from experience and examples published online that a song getting 10k streams in a month is likely to get a popularity score of 30 or more, but 10k streams is of course far less than 30% of what the song with a 100 popularity score is getting in that month!  So it's not a straight ratio.

However, for your purposes, which is simply to highlight the "most interesting" performers in the German market, a good approximation would be the performers with the most streams to Germany.  There is of course an adjustment to the value of those streams based on how long ago they occurred (which by my observation also seems to the logarithmic, as it seems a stream more than 28 days old will already have less weight), but you could probably ignore that for your list.  There is definitely data for each artist's streams to Germany (I see my current streams to Germany, for instance, as well as have records of those streams from when I am paid distributions), but likely that's not public data.

But, oh, look, here's a playlist https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWTdV9tXbHOAv that seems to be the most popular artists in Germany, or at least the most popular songs in Germany last year, and the associated performers.  It would likely be a pretty good proxy for what you're trying to do, in that you'd probably capture most of the top artists from this playlist.