The Gamification of Pop Music
With the rise of streaming—and a fantasy football–style approach to chart analytics—fandoms are working the system for their favorite pop starsThe Gamification of Pop Music
With the rise of streaming—and a fantasy football–style approach to chart analytics—fandoms are working the system for their favorite pop stars
On April 9, Billboard announced a new app called the Hot 100 Challenge. The publication, known for producing weekly music charts, offered “fantasy-sports-style gameplay” for pop music fans. In the app, players listened to songs and predicted the peak position those songs would reach on the Hot 100 chart before the “season” ended on July 16. The closer the guess, the more points the player would get. If they predicted correctly, they’d earn 7,500 points. If their guess was within one position, they’d be given 4,999 points. If their guess was within 10 positions, they would earn 4,945 points, and so on.
The app was the ultimate test for pop fans. To succeed in the Hot 100 Challenge, you had to do more than infer what a song’s peak chart position would be. You had to understand the music industry’s game. Where would a song that’s driven by streaming, like Chappell Roan’s “Femininomenon,” land compared to a song driven by radio airplay, like Post Malone’s “I Had Some Help”? What would matter more: the cultural momentum of Brat Summer or the TikTok-fueled success of a two-year-old song like Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season”? The Billboard Hot 100 used to be the industry standard to understand what is popular in the U.S. music market. Now, it’s a fan-focused product, inciting competition and fantasy football–esque gaming.
Players entered the Challenge for more than just bragging rights. The publication awarded the inaugural winner, Easton Erosa, a $25,000 cash prize for his 409,729 points. Runner-up Lamar D. won VIP access to a Billboard event. The charts are now a high-stakes leaderboard for artists vying for their breakthrough hit and the fans themselves.
The Hot 100 Challenge might be a unique offering from Billboard, but it’s just one example of how the music industry caters to pop music’s most devoted fans. In 2024, fandoms had more agency than ever to manipulate, influence, and gamify pop music. This power comes from the popularization of music streaming, the growth of stan communities, and more access than ever to music data. The result is something like the data-driven, analytically minded sports fandom for music. Some fandoms are applying sports mentalities to their favorite pop stars, quantifying and methodizing how to support and follow their idols. As the experience of pop fandom evolves into a high-stakes competition, it’s increasingly obvious that the game is an impossible one to win.
Competitiveness and comparison have been part of the music industry for decades. The Stones versus the Beatles. Blur versus Oasis. Britney versus Christina. Kanye versus 50 Cent. From Beatlemania to Biebermania, fans have always played a key role in an artist’s success. In older fandoms, devotees focused on proving themselves as the most passionate fans. But now more than ever before, contemporary fans utilize their collective power to influence the market and measure their impact.
It’s a feedback loop: The more weight that fans place on numbers, the more they try to influence them. And the more they influence the numbers, the more weight they give them as accurate representations of success and fandom.
Artists and labels have long used dubious tactics to inflate their numbers, from payola to ticket bundling (artists used to “bundle” a digital download of their album with ticket sales so that each ticket sold would also count for another album sale, a method that Billboard no longer counts). In the ’90s, labels would release a song exclusively to radio until it developed demand. When the song was finally released to the public, it would automatically chart higher on the Hot 100 due to the song’s preexisting radio airplay. Nowadays, artists release sped-up and slowed-and-reverbed remixes to cater to the TikTok crowd and increase the streams of singles; they sell variants of the same vinyl to entice fans to buy the same album multiple times. Back in June, Taylor Swift released a U.K.-exclusive version of her newest album, supposedly to block a rival from hitting no. 1 across the pond.
But now, fans see themselves as responsible for maximizing the numbers of their favorite artists, and they’ve developed their own strategies to do it. They form streaming parties, use VPNs to boost streams in certain countries, and navigate the hidden rules of Spotify and YouTube to prevent so-called “artificial streams,” which streaming services typically remove from a song’s total listenership. [Editor’s note: The Ringer is owned by Spotify.] This type of involvement from fandoms developed during the 2010s, but two key songs released in 2020 laid the foundation for the participatory sports-fan mindset seen today: Justin Bieber’s “Yummy” and BTS’s “Dynamite.”
In a now-deleted 2020 Instagram post, Bieber reposted fan-made guidelines for how to stream his single “Yummy” so it could reach no. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The tactics included: “Buy the song multiple times on Justin’s website” and “Don’t mute it! Play at a low volume. Let it play while you sleep.” Scooter Braun, Bieber’s manager at the time, told fans not to buy more than four or five copies, otherwise they wouldn’t count.
Although Bieber was widely criticized for the “desperate” promotion, his strategies weren’t new. Taylor Swift’s “Taylor Swift Tix” tactic gave fans a better spot in the ticketing queue for her 2018 tour if they watched her music videos multiple times or purchased her 2017 album, Reputation, up to 13 times. In 2018, Nicki Minaj and Travis Scott butted heads over Scott’s bundling of an Astroworld digital download with exclusive merch drops and concert access. And by 2020, the barrier to entry for pop standom was lower than ever: You don’t need to have the money to spend on vinyl, CDs, posters, and merch if you have done enough high-intensity streaming to support your fav.
Bieber didn’t just endorse these tactics; he publicized them for other fandoms to use. According to pop fan and TikToker Norris Jay, who wrote about the Billboard charts on Medium, “Yummy” represented a shift into the current era of pop fandom as competition. “It’s a lot easier now than it was at least in the past decade to, in some cases, manipulate the charts [as a fan],” he says. Ultimately, “Yummy” peaked at no. 2, behind Roddy Ricch’s “The Box.”
Later in 2020, fan efforts behind BTS’s “Dynamite” proved the effectiveness of fan organization. Digital Music News described the efforts of the BTS “Army” as they tried to push the music video for “Dynamite” to 100 million views in the first 24 hours of release. One fan commented, “I’m slowly losing hope, I’m afraid we won’t reach our goal … but I won’t stop str34ming.”
The Army’s efforts paid off. “Dynamite” became the first song by a South Korean group to chart at no. 1 in the U.S. BTS didn’t explicitly ask for fans to behave this way, even if they encouraged it more subtly. As a result, “Dynamite” was never maligned in the way “Yummy” was, though both artists benefited from the same labor efforts from fans.
“BTS are one of the biggest pop acts in America in the last few years, and most people couldn’t name a single song by them,” says Todd in the Shadows, a popular YouTuber with over 600,000 subscribers who reviews music anonymously. “Maybe one [song]. If you know more than two, you are more educated on BTS than, like, 80 percent of normie America. … I don’t want to underrate how big BTS is; they have the power. … But the fact that they can be so big in America with, at best, two real hits, I think that demonstrates the power of a really dedicated fandom.”
If Bieber’s “Yummy” popularized the concept, then “Dynamite” was proof that the concept could actually work, without blowback on the artists themselves. Now, those tactics are everywhere. Even if you don’t see every pop star begging their fans to stream their latest single so it charts, those methods have become normalized.
Being a fan in the age of the internet has always involved some level of free publicity on behalf of the artists. Everything that circulates in fan communities—art, theories, discussion, and more—draws attention back toward the artist. Ben Radomsky ran a One Direction Tumblr account as a teenager and accrued thousands of followers. On it, he posted “fan art, early memes, just always content of the guys,” and he learned to write code and edit photos for his account. He described his Tumblr as a “lotta free PR for [their] abs and flat asses.”
But now, the labor that many fans engage in serves a different priority. Clusters of fans see upholding the popularity and acclaim of their favorite artists as their responsibility. Radomsky compares the fandom of his adolescence to contemporary fan culture: “It was teens being teens instead of taking on the grunt work of promotion or justifying your stan-hood to grown adults.” For some types of fans, the labor of fandom has shifted from free publicity to purposefully generating artists more money, fame, and chart success. Whether the fans are critiquing an album’s rollout strategy or trashing the streaming numbers of a competitor, the success of a pop star is now an integral part of a fan’s relationship with their favorite artist.
Throughout most of the music industry’s history, fandoms lacked the ability to manipulate pop success because its primary measures—album sales and chart positions—were calculated behind closed doors. The Recording Industry Association of America certified albums as platinum or gold through a flawed calculation of “sales.” A 1995 article from the Los Angeles Times describes, “A record is ‘sold’ once it has been in retailers’ hands for 60 days—even though retailers can eventually return unsold product for cash or credit. In some cases over the years, the number of ‘returns’ on an album has reportedly been in the hundreds of thousands.”
Early on, the other main metrics for success, the actual Billboard charts, were compiled through an even more venal tactic. The magazine would talk to individual record stores and ask what records sold, which was, as another Ringer article notes, “often a manual and semi-accurate and flagrantly corrupt process.” In 1991, Nielsen SoundScan started tracking sales based on when an album passed through a barcode scanner. Without the easily biased intermediary between record stores and charts, Billboard charts became slightly more transparent, though still susceptible to payola.
But even with the changes in calculations, all fans could do was buy the music they liked. Even if fandoms acted en masse and bought albums, they could impact the Billboard charts and RIAA certifications to only an extent, since those metrics were embellished, manipulated, and imprecise. “The average fan didn’t necessarily have the power in the ’80s and the ’90s to boost the numbers other than just buying the record,” says music critic and Ringer contributor Steven Hyden. “I guess if you were really crazy, you could just buy every record in the store. But that would cost a lot of money and be hard.”
There’s always been a fixation on what pop star is on top. Hyden says that the obsession with numbers goes back well before the Spotify era. “Album sales and going platinum or going gold, that was a big deal.” But the power to market an artist came from labels and promoters. Even if a fan cared how many copies of Purple Rain Prince sold, there wasn’t much they could do to move the needle. Today, that power has shifted from labels to fans, and from private and fuzzy metrics to publicly available, cold, hard numbers.
In 2024, there is more music data than ever, and most of it is public. Look at Spotify: The desktop interface for the app displays how many streams every song in its 100-million-song library has accumulated. Especially for a highly anticipated new single, streaming numbers provide a real-time look at the size of an audience. For those invested in a song’s success or failure, it’s almost like a health bar in a video game.
The 500 most popular artists on Spotify are rewarded with a badge on their profile that shows where they rank. So if you visit Ariana Grande’s page, she’s tagged as “2nd in the world,” while Charli XCX currently sits at 161st. It’s a built-in leaderboard that lends itself to competitiveness: Who is no. 1? Who is climbing the ranks? Will Sabrina Carpenter (currently no. 12) leapfrog Sia (holding firm at no. 11)? And who got booted to the bottom?
The sheer amount of data—Spotify, Shazam, TikTok usage, YouTube views, number of Grammys, RIAA certifications, weeks on Billboard’s charts—is overwhelming. Fans can now battle it out over fancams that put album sales side by side or get key insights from the Shazam Radio Spins chart. Even album reviews and critic scores from Pitchfork are aggregated on Metacritic and meticulously tracked as signifiers for “winning.”
Nicki Camberg was the lead data journalist at Chartmetric, a music data provider, and a self-proclaimed “Tumblr girl back in the day.” She describes the recent change in the culture of fandom: “Throughout history, people [have been] like, ‘I like Paul. I like John. I like Ringo. Who’s your favorite Beatle?’ There’s always been beef between fans trying to say their person is the best person. But I think in the modern age of data being so accessible, it makes people feel like they’re quantifying the success of their person. So people can argue all day long that one song sounds better than another. But you can’t argue when a song has more streams. That’s just a concrete fact.”
Perhaps no one is more responsible for publicizing music data than the Twitter/X account Chart Data. Chart Data is an eight-year-old account with more than 2.6 million followers. It typically posts over 10 times a day with updates on chart stats, accolades, streaming counts, and more. The account is the gold standard—retweeted by celebrities, artists, and stans alike—and is often the battlefield where fans deal vicious insults to enemies of their “favs.” The person behind Chart Data, who wished to remain anonymous, recognizes their impact on the current obsession with music data: “I would like to think that I, along with several others that are focused on charts, are at least partially responsible for steering that.”
A Twitter user and pop fan going by the display name Ivy Park Township is less subtle about Chart Data’s influence: “It seems like once fans got hold of Chart Data, they could grasp something that felt like success. … I remember it was a huge story when Gaga did 100 million views on ‘Telephone,’ but it was printed and written about. Now you have so much data that fans can disseminate themselves and, like, write a story around it. I wanna blame it all on Chart Data.”
This is a different kind of fandom from the online communities of the 2010s. It has morphed into something new: sports fandom for music. Data-obsessed pop fans are now equipped with power rankings, player stats, and trends to help them predict the future. Talk of the Charts models the calculations of the Billboard Hot 100 chart to provide midweek updates and projections for the following week, essentially the equivalent of ESPN’s power rankings. The account Spotify Daily Data provides hyper-specific streaming stats, not unlike data from StatMuse. Every pop star has at least one account that meticulously tracks their charting history, streaming statistics, and data. Like athletes, many have an army of these accounts. For fans of Dua Lipa, you have Dua Lipa Data, Dua Lipa Chart Data, Dua Lipa Charts, and, likely, more.
The sports-fan comparison is not lost on pop fans. Chart Data says fandoms’ relationships to music charts and sports/fantasy football are “100 percent the same.” Todd in the Shadows agrees: “Standom has basically been a sports fandom for a while.” In an interview with The New York Times, Jonathan Daniel (whose firm, Crush, represents Lorde, Miley Cyrus, and others) called stan Twitter “their version of sports.”
Of course, no matter how much a Lakers fan loves the Lakers, they cannot get on the court and take passes from LeBron. For pop fans, their sportslike devotion to their favorite stars isn’t just rooting for them, tracking their data, and cheering when they win. The power to influence pop—through social media, streaming, or purchasing—gives them a sense of buy-in. It’s participatory. It’s a game.
Stan Twitter is the harbinger of pop music’s descent into gamification. These online communities are often deemed “toxic,” and, on many occasions, violate boundaries. But their involvement in artists’ success often comes from the very human desire to be taken seriously. Jay, who has written about stan communities and their impact on the Billboard charts, says, “It’s human to be invested in somebody else’s ventures. For so many people, obviously, sports is that thing. For a lot of people, it’s reality competition shows. We all have our different avenues through which we like to compete. And I think that with music, it’s something that’s tied toward people who have not traditionally had as much of an opportunity to engage with the predominant force of that, which is sports.”
Pop music provides an outlet for many fans—especially those who are younger and queer—to be competitive. “If you’re a 17-year-old gay kid growing up in Montana and you’re always an outsider and nobody takes you seriously, I can see why charts and music would be your avenue into that human drive toward competition. It’s an avenue to live through other people,” Jay says.
When it comes to industry-wide awards like the Grammys, “it’s just a recognition. As a fan, you clearly want your favorite artist to get it because you know they deserve it,” says the person who runs the Twitter account Billie Eilish Daily Spotify. The account is run by an 18-year-old from Mexico, who wished to remain anonymous. They started Billie Eilish Daily Spotify after seeing similar accounts grow throughout 2023. As per their username, they post updates on Eilish’s streams, including tables that detail total streams, gains, and percent change. Since Eilish released her third album in May, the account has gained over 10,000 new followers.
“Nowadays, on social media, you see a concern with this issue. [There’s] a lot of hate just because your favorite artist didn’t win,” they say. There’s a sense of recognition in connecting with other fans around your favorite artist, specifically when tied to that artist’s success and data. Billie Eilish Spotify Updates continues, “[It] leads to a good community, people who feel the same interest in Billie, where you can comment on the music, the achievements, and even make streaming parties so that as you support the artist for her work, you meet new people.”
Various tech platforms have begun to capitalize on fans’ gamification. The app Sesh officially launched in 2024 and facilitates online streaming parties between fans. According to its website, Sesh hosts listening sessions, “created for moments like single or album releases where fans collectively stream music, supporting the artists success.” In a press release for the app’s launch, Sesh CEO Pepe del Río described the platform’s streaming parties as “a strategic tool to amplify a song’s reach and visibility. This is achieved through both direct streaming numbers and algorithmic recognition.”
In 2024, Spotify introduced its listening party feature, which “offers a live, audio-only experience where fans can join a party with their favorite artists to listen to their music, engage with the artist, ask questions, and shop their latest merch.” Data provider and tech platform Chartmetric started creating charts that depict the growth of buzzing artists like Chappell Roan and Ayra Starr. Perhaps there’s a market for fans to have the same data access as labels.
Individually, fans often prefer not to associate themselves with the data-driven, chart-obsessed contingent of pop’s most online. At the same time, the numbers don’t lie. And when those numbers are framed to present their favorite artist as successful and popular, it’s a validating feeling. Stan Twitter and parasocial relationships with pop stars have been well-documented developments throughout the 2010s. But as the access to music data has increased, so has the presence of extreme, numbers-driven fans. Those fans are now louder than ever. Armed with the tactics of K-pop fans, data availability, and the competitiveness of sports fans, every week can feel like a chart race for pop’s most devoted. The noise they create reverberates across the internet in a way it never has before.
Of course, these fans represent only one faction (and a very small one) among a larger collective. But they’ve altered the fabric of success in pop. Casual fans now recognize a shift. “Before, you wanted to be the indie hipster kid where no one knew your artists,” Camberg says. “[Now] we’re celebrating that this artist got this milestone in data that the artist might not even be aware of.”
The person behind Chart Data says that “aside from a week or two here and there, I don’t think we are [in an era of more intense chart battles]. The overall streaming volume has grown but also flattened, meaning the top hits are mostly at the same level and waiting their turn to take no. 1 for a week or two. With more information being available publicly, there’s a perception that each week becomes more intense than it actually is.” Perhaps pop fans who play the game are most effective at creating the aura that their artists are bigger than they are. Hyden agrees: “You don’t need that many people to create a lot of noise or the illusion of a lot of noise. So I think that does create a greater intensity. It supercharges the engagement that a certain kind of fan has with their favorite artists.”
Terminology also plays a role in the competitive spectacle of pop. The term “Main Pop Girl” originated well before the pandemic. Chart Data says, “You can trace ‘flop,’ ‘we love an organic smash,’ etc. all the way back to the beginnings of the 2010s.” While older fans might use these terms ironically, newcomers have never been privy to pop fandom without them. These terms inherently apply a sports-fan mindset to pop music: There’s a winner and a loser. But applying a sports mentality to pop is flawed. Even if Taylor Swift continues her winning streak of no. 1 albums, there is no surefire way for her, or her fans, to win pop.
Perhaps the size of the pop stage has decreased, giving fandoms more collective power. Todd in the Shadows argues that “music matters less and less.” In clarifying his statement, Todd says, “We are not in the era of MTV or Total Request Live. How big Taylor Swift was last year, there used to be dozens of people this big.” Music is in competition with all other forms of entertainment for attention, a battle it might be losing. A 2023 article from Billboard noted how “increased competition for time and attention from video games and social media” could be responsible for the lack of new pop stars.
As pop fans continue to mirror sports fans, there’s also an appetite for betting. DraftKings held a free-to-enter Grammys prediction pool for the 2024 awards, giving away $5,000 to the winners. The pool received nearly 36,000 entries. Music-related betting also takes more informal forms. Ivy Park Township organized a pool to bet on the Pitchfork score of Charli XCX’s album Brat. Entrants filled out a Google Form and sent $5 through Venmo to enter. It received over 100 entries in less than 24 hours. Ivy Park Township says, “I wasn’t sure anyone would willingly hand over $5 to an internet stranger, but people did.” Although they haven’t seen anyone else organize similar pools, they’re “sure it’s been done. I would participate. People asked me to do another one for chart positions.” [Disclaimer: I participated in the pool and was among the group of 10 people who won.]
What started as warfare among fans has bled out into the media. From Pop Base to The New York Times to the actual charts themselves, competition and ranking are now a central part of the pop music discussion. In May of this year, the Times published a piece titled “How Big Is Taylor Swift?” to understand her stardom relative to others. As pop’s heavyweights and newcomers continue to battle on the charts, there’s already buzz for the 2025 Grammy Awards, particularly as the growth of Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan puts them in competition for Best New Artist.
By definition, sports have a clear victor, but pop will never offer the same clarity. While sales, charts, and influence certainly indicate levels of popularity, music cannot be “won” or “lost.” If there were a winner in the competition to be the ultimate Main Pop Girl, Taylor Swift is about as likely a choice as you can get, with millions of records sold, the blockbuster Eras Tour, and cultural ubiquity. But even her success doesn’t seem to be enough for contingents of her fans, who lash out against bad reviews or Stevie Wonder’s unbroken chart record.
The music industry itself isn’t quite winning from this gamification either. In late July, stock in Universal Music Group, the biggest record label conglomerate in the world, fell by 30 percent due to declining streaming revenues. In September, Lucian Grainge, chairman and CEO of UMG, stated his intentions to capitalize on superfandom in a speech during Capital Markets Day. He called music superfans “a core component of music economics” and introduced plans for “more engaging and appealing consumer experiences, including specifically designed new products and premium tiers for the superfan.” Goldman Sachs said that superfans represent an untapped market valued at $4.2 billion.
Perhaps the only true winner so far is the Hot 100 Challenge victor, Easton Erosa, who took home a cash prize for his chart expertise. Unlike sports, pop can never provide the glory of a good, honest victory from the sidelines because pop is an impossible game to play, let alone win. Sure, it can be validating to see your favorite artist find success, but that rarely justifies the fans’ unpaid labor and grunt work that the pop game demands. The joy of being a fan will always come from developing a strong connection with a piece of media, whether that’s an artist, a team, or the charts themselves. But as the lines continue to blur between pop fans and active participants in the pop game, the fandom experience starts to lose its meaning. If pop slides further into data-driven, contentious competition, it’ll never be the true fans who win.