@mattsheffield We have to be careful looking at plays and rankings as an indicator of human sentiment. The marketplaces (Apple, Spotify, YouTube) have outsized influence. If people choose a mood and just let the service pick tracks forever, the play count reflects how many times the algorithm selected the track, not how many people sought it out and listened to it on purpose.

It’s not all algorithms. Those play counts definitely include real people really playing this song intentionally. But it is impossible to know the proportion of plays that humans initiated versus the various algorithms. And “ranks” cannot be independently verified. Apple can say whatever they want and no one can contradict them.

It’s really hard to decide what conclusions to draw from data like this.