**How Music Charts by Chartmetric is a publication that aims to explain, explore, and/or uncover insights into the music industry using the power of data.** As part of our mission to be a platform for all artists, we are always looking for new contributors from diverse backgrounds to tell music stories that matter to them and provide interesting perspectives on the ever-evolving music landscape. Blog post pitches should demonstrate the writer’s familiarity with Chartmetric and our data-driven approach to storytelling. Topics should be specific and focused, as posts should be around 1000-1500 words.

If you aren’t a Chartmetric user already, we recommend you sign up and explore our features. It helps to be familiar with our product, as it's the main data source for our blog posts. Once a pitch is approved, we will provide free access to our exclusive and extensive data on the music industry as is needed for freelancers to be able to write their stories. You cannot use this free data access for any commercial uses or other publications while freelancing with us. However, if you belong to a newsroom and want data for your team to use, reach out and we can have a separate conversation about that!

After reading through these instructions, feel free to submit your pitch to us using the Google Form linked at the bottom of this page.

NOTE: AT THIS TIME WE ARE CURRENTLY NOT ACCEPTING PITCHES FROM NEW FREELANCERS (AS OF JAN 2024)

What We Look For

We are looking for articles that fit in one or multiple of our general topic umbrellas: market-specific trends, tech trends, TikTok trends, artist case studies, and Chartmetric feature-driven pieces. That said, we are open to any type of article, provided it's interesting and fits within the scope of our site. Note that due to the nature of our in-depth data work, we don’t publish breaking news stories, but we do like to cover timely trends and events. We also encourage pieces about international artists and/or trends! Here are some previous articles for your reference:

• Market-specific trends: How the Barbie Movie Soundtrack Became a Viral Success, Ice Spice, Coi Leray, and the Gen-Z Rappers Leading Cutecore Rap, Heartbreak Music is Having a Self-Empowering Moment, The Rise of Brazilian Music Genres: Sertanejo, Funk Carioca, and Pisadinha, Why East Asian Cultures Are Influencing Latin Music
• Tech trends: Human vs. Machine: Can Virtual Artists Really Compete?, The Sounds of Indie? The Power of Major Labels and Niche Spaces in Spotify Recommendations, Level Up Your Playlist: The Growing Popularity of Video Game Music
• TikTok trends: How “Need 2” Turned Into the Pinegrove Shuffle, Nightcore and Slowed & Reverb Remixes Spur a 2010s Revival, The Boygenius Effect: How the Supergroup Sparked the “Sad” Folk-Pop TikTok Movement, How a New Strain of Goth Alt-Pop Evolved on TikTok
• Artist case study: How Kylie Minogue’s Padam Padam Became 2023’s Ultimate Pride Anthem, dhruv Proves the Globalization of Music Can Break New Artists
• Chartmetric feature-driven: A List of Today's Top Independent Spotify Playlist Curators

Articles should fall into the range of 1000 to 1500 words, though this is not a hard limit and if you think your piece needs to be longer/shorter, you can reach out and discuss that with us. We do on occasion publish longer, more investigative/visual pieces, like this one on Taylor Swift’s opening acts, so if you have an idea for something like that we are open to hearing it.

We are a multilingual publication proudly publishing content in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese. If you have fluency in a language other than English and would be able to translate your English article to another language, please note that in the submission form. We are happy to receive contributing writers from anywhere in the world.

Your piece should be using Chartmetric’s data to educate, inform, or tell a story to our audience about the music industry and how artists/songs/genres/etc thrive or falter in that ecosystem. If your idea falls outside of this realm, you can still pitch it, but we might not be able to accept it.

Pitch Details

The pitch should be as detailed as possible. We will help you tune your pitch, but there has to be a story there. Instead of saying, "I want to write about how TikTok affects the music industry," consider, "I want to explore how the Wednesday dance trend on TikTok led to the rise in popularity of The Cramps among Gen-Zers.”

Our stories often feature data visualizations that help showcase our findings, so let us know if you feel comfortable creating data vizzes yourself. We are also happy to provide technical support if needed! Your story must include and/or feature Chartmetric’s data, and your pitch must say which data you plan on using and how. ****For an initial pitch, we don’t expect you to provide us with polished charts or actually use real data to make them. A rough sketch, mockup, or written description of what you envision will suffice.

Any format for your pitch is acceptable, but we would generally appreciate a page-ish document (can be bullet points/incomplete sentences!) with a rough outline of what you plan to talk about, what Chartmetric data you expect to use to tell your story, and ideas for data vizzes as are relevant.

Data

What data does Chartmetric have? So glad you asked! We are the most widely used market analytics service in the music industry, and have data on over 9 million artists, 93 million songs, and 17.5 million playlists going back to around 2018. For each of these, we have a variety of metrics on engagement (i.e. Spotify monthly listeners, TikTok likes, YouTube views), fan base (like Instagram followers or YouTube subscribers), audience demographics (including location!), streaming milestones, radio airplay, TV/movie/game syncs, concerts, genre, playlist curators, and so, so, so much more! Basically, if you want to know something about music, we have it. We collect and present data from all of the following sources: