Month: December 2023

With over 15 million listeners, Spotify’s RapCaviar has been called “the most influential playlist in music.” RapCaviar is curated by Spotify’s editorial team and updated daily to represent the latest and greatest hip-hop and rap tracks.

For the last year, I’ve saved a daily snapshot of the playlist using the Spotify API to empirically determine the biggest rappers in hip hop today. In this post, we’ll use hard data to approximate influence, hustle, and longevity for rap’s biggest names during 2023.

Methodology

To collect the data, I scheduled a Python script to run daily to (1) hit Spotify’s API to collect the RapCaviar track list and (2) save the resulting data frame as a .csv file to an S3 bucket. After pulling down and combining all daily files from S3 using an R script, the tidied dataset contains 11 fields:

Field Name	Sample Value
Playlist Id	37i9dQZF1DX0XUsuxWHRQd
Playlist Name	RapCaviar
Track Playlist Position	2
Track Name	Mad Max
Track Id	2i2qDe3dnTl6maUE31FO7c
Track Release Date	2022-12-16
Track Added At	2022-12-30
Artist Track Position	1
Artist Name	Lil Durk
Artist Id	3hcs9uc56yIGFCSy9leWe7
Date	2023-01-02

After the cleaning and duplication process, the dataset contains 469 total tracks with 271 distinct artists represented across 351 distinct playlist snapshots between January 1 to December 27, 2023.

Metrics

Influence

Let’s start with influence: what percent of available days was a given artist represented on the playlist? For example, if an artist appeared in 50 of the 351 possible daily snapshots, their “influence” score would be 14.2%.

Here are the top ten rappers ranked by this influence metric, for 2023:

Name	Days Represented	Percent of Available
Drake	351	100%
Future	351	100%
Gucci Mane	351	100%
Travis Scott	351	100%
21 Savage	344	98%
Kodak Black	330	94%
Yeat	328	93%
Latto	311	89%
Lil Uzi Vert	309	88%
Quavo	302	86%

Impressively, four artists yielded sufficient influence to maintain a presence on the playlist every day of the year: Drake, Future, Gucci Mane, and Travis Scott. Here’s a visual representation of their dominant year:

Each colored line represents a unique track. With the y-axis reversed, the chart shows how new tracks enter the playlist positioned near the top and then descend over time. The biggest surprise to me is Gucci Mane, who managed to maintain his presence on the playlist via 14 distinct tracks released throughout the year:

Notably, 21 Savage was only a week short of full coverage, coming in at 98%.

Looking at the distribution of influence scores for all artists appearing at least once during the year, 38 (14%) were present in the RapCaviar playlist more than half of the year:

Density

It’s one thing for an artist to have one of their tracks represented on RapCaviar, but the heavyweights often have several at once. “Density” is calculated as a distinct count of tracks by artist and day.

The highest density score for 2023 was 6, a score achieved by just four rappers:

Density	Artist | Dates
6 tracks	21 Savage | Jun 23 – Jul 13 (21 days)
6 tracks	Lil Wayne | Nov 10 – 16 (7 days)
6 tracks	Drake | Oct 7 – 12 (6 days)
6 tracks	Travis Scott | Aug 3 (1 day)

Most impressive is 21 Savage’s dominant 21-day, 6-track run over the summer, preceded by a 20-day, 5-track run. Notably, during the 6-track spree, all six were features or joint tracks:

1. Pull Up (feat. 21 Savage)
2. Wit Da Racks (feat. 21 Savage, Travis Scott & Yak Gotti)
3. Peaches & Eggplants (feat. 21 Savage)
4. 06 Gucci (feat. DaBaby & 21 Savage)
5. War Bout It (feat. 21 Savage)
6. Spin Bout U (with Drake)

Contributing to more than 10% of the playlist’s track count simultaneously is truly impressive (RapCaviar usually has 50 tracks total); rap’s heavyweights are dense.

Longevity

Finally, let’s consider longevity, meaning how long an artist’s tracks remains on the playlist. Here are the top ten songs by lifespan on the RapCaviar track list during ’23:

Track	Artist	Days	First Day	Last Day
f*kumean	Gunna	179	Jun 19	Dec 14
Turn Yo Clic Up	Quavo	167	Jul 14	Dec 27
Search & Rescue	Drake	161	Apr 7	Sep 15
500lbs	Lil Tecca	159	Jul 21	Dec 27
I KNOW ?	Travis Scott	153	Jul 28	Dec 27
Paint The Town Red	Doja Cat	146	Aug 4	Dec 27
MELTDOWN	Travis Scott	143	Aug 1	Dec 21
Private Landing	Don Toliver	136	Feb 24	Jul 13
Superhero	Metro Boomin	135	Jan 2	May 25
All My Life	Lil Durk	133	May 12	Sep 21

Importantly, four of the tracks in the top ten are still active (italicized above), so there’s a decent chance Turn Yo Clic Up could outlive f*kumean. Speaking of which, Gunna’s first top-ten solo single managed to spend almost six months on RapCaviar, complete with a position surge in mid-August:

Zooming in, here’s the position history for all of those top ten tracks:

Most of the time, a track will debut on the playlist and then fade out over time, sinking deeper in the set list before falling off. Good examples are All My Life, Private Landing, and Search & Rescue. Hits like 500lbs and Paint The Town Red are more anomalous, with momentum building within the playlist over time.

To close this metric out, let’s look at the top ten rappers with the highest average longevity per track, for those artists with three or more distinct tracks ever appearing on the playlist during the year:

Name	Median Longevity	Average Longevity	Track Count
Gunna	116	103	4
Metro Boomin	92	96	6
Ice Spice	96	72	4
Latto	75	74	4
Moneybagg Yo	75	69	6
Lil Uzi Vert	68	64	8
Don Toliver	41	64	5
Toosii	79	63	3
Key Glock	61	62	4
Sexyy Red	63	62	4

Conclusion

The influence and density metrics point toward the same heavyweights: 21 Savage, Drake, and Travis Scott. This is intuitive since the two metrics are correlated. The longevity metric shines the spotlight on a different subset of rappers, like Gunna, Metro Boomin, and Ice Spice.

Either way, it was a great year for rap. Thanks for reading!

• Python script (scheduled sourcing)
• R script (combining, cleaning, visualization)
• Raw dataset
• Clean dataset