That being said, while I can see the chart, I don’t see any numbers, so I’m assuming that they must be coming from somewhere else, though I don’t have any reason to doubt them; it sounds like tasteofcountry.com is reputable.
That article does point out that there are a substantial number of Spotify users listening to the song, though if I remember, there was some past discussion about how various people had tried trying to game Spotify’s recommendation system to try to get more people listening to their songs, so maybe someone could just be leveraging that hard?
I’m not sure if this is what I’m remembering. I wasn’t super-interested at the time, but I thought that it was talking about how some artists had been gaming the system to be more-frequently-recommended, whereas this is talking about Spotify apparently taking money to increase recommendations.
EDIT: I can’t find any news story that seems to fit what I thought I remember reading. I do see a LinkedIn page talking about tactics to attack Spotify’s recommendation algorithm:
The little info (i) box on Billboards website actually cites their data, “The week’s most popular downloaded songs, ranked by sales data as compiled by Luminate.” Which I assume refers to luminatedata.com
Sadly their data (the numbers specifically) aren’t publicly available.
I think it’s worth clarifying that it’s #1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales. That’s a specific category.
According to https://tasteofcountry.com/breaking-rust-explained-ai-country-song in order to reach number one would only take ~3,000 purchases.
That’s a shockingly low number, so if anyone can confirm that or has better numbers, I’d love to know.
But last time I brought a digital song, they cost $1. So for a couple thousand dollars any song could be number one in this category.
If I were an AI company swimming in money, that’s a drop in the bucket for some free publicity.
The Billboard chart in question is behind a paywall.
Someone on a Reddit discussion on the same song pointed out that it could be bypassed with:
https://open.bolha.tools/ and plugging in the Billboard URL https://www.billboard.com/charts/country-digital-song-sales/
That being said, while I can see the chart, I don’t see any numbers, so I’m assuming that they must be coming from somewhere else, though I don’t have any reason to doubt them; it sounds like tasteofcountry.com is reputable.
That article does point out that there are a substantial number of Spotify users listening to the song, though if I remember, there was some past discussion about how various people had tried trying to game Spotify’s recommendation system to try to get more people listening to their songs, so maybe someone could just be leveraging that hard?
kagis
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/11/05/spotify-hit-with-class-action-lawsuit-alleging-discovery-mode-is-a-pay-for-play-scheme/
I’m not sure if this is what I’m remembering. I wasn’t super-interested at the time, but I thought that it was talking about how some artists had been gaming the system to be more-frequently-recommended, whereas this is talking about Spotify apparently taking money to increase recommendations.
EDIT: I can’t find any news story that seems to fit what I thought I remember reading. I do see a LinkedIn page talking about tactics to attack Spotify’s recommendation algorithm:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/advanced-techniques-legally-hacking-spotifys-algorithm-nicolas-rabaud-eawve
So I imagine that there are probably people out there working hard to game it, though I suppose that that’s probably something of a given.
The little info (i) box on Billboards website actually cites their data, “The week’s most popular downloaded songs, ranked by sales data as compiled by Luminate.” Which I assume refers to luminatedata.com
Sadly their data (the numbers specifically) aren’t publicly available.