Uniquely American: How Independence Day Impacts Streaming Behavior

Country and Classic Rock Artists Lead Streaming Surges

The 4th of July: BBQ, Beer, Freedom, and Fireworks. Independence Day (July 4th) is the third most common paid holiday in the U.S., with 92% of civilian workers receiving a paid holiday. With Americans getting time off to celebrate comes unique music streaming behavior.

We already know that every Christmas, Mariah Carey and Michael Buble dethaw and skyrocket up the streaming charts. I wanted to dig a little deeper to find out what artists are benefitting most from America’s Independence Day.

The individual tracks that see the most impact are pretty obvious, and you could probably list them off the top of your head (Party In The U.S.A, Born in the U.S.A, American Girl), but if we dive a little deeper we find some interesting increases.

From July 3rd to 4th, Party In The USA, Chicken Fried, and Wagon Wheel see the largest increases day over day. Interestingly enough, Born In The USA by Bruce Springsteen ranked #8 on the US Daily Chart on July 4th (second only to Miley among America-themed anthems), clocking in at a little bit under 1 million streams. However, it did not chart in the Top 200 on July 3rd, making it ineligible on this chart.

Now to focus a little more big picture of how an artist’s discography is impacted on the holiday. On July 4th, Taylor Swift remained the #1 Artist on US Spotify, so you could still make the case that she is the most uniquely American artist due to her stability on streaming. Even more so, it’s impressive that she is able to hold this title without any of her songs being uniquely adjacent to or referencing the 4th of July. The best way to figure out which artist is uniquely American would be to take the daily streams for the days prior to their entire catalog and then measure the percent increase. Unfortunately, Spotify gatekeeps a lot of this data so we’re only able to access the Top 200 Tracks Daily Streaming Totals.

Greatest Gainers on Spotify Artists Chart, July 3rd to July 4th

We can see here that on the overall artists chart, Toby Keith, Eric Church, and Zac Brown Band saw the greatest ranking jumps to their overall discography. Most of the artists we see here with these large jumps are veterans in their respective genres of classic rock and country.

I need to call out that Pitbull jumped 7 spots, and how American is that!

Not included in this table are the artists who re-entered the Top 200 Spotify chart on July 4th: Bruce Springsteen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Sublime, Sam Hunt, Miranda Lambert, Daryl Hall & John Oates, Brooks & Dunn, John Mellencamp, The Beach Boys, Alan Jackson, and Journey.

Another way to slice the data is to consider which artists had the most tracks increase in streams from July 3rd to July 4th. If we look this way, Morgan Wallen, Bad Bunny, and Luke Combs each have 3+ tracks each drawing a positive percent increase in streams. Morgan Wallen leads the pack with 6.

Looking forward to future years, it will be interesting to see which songs and artists continue to see streaming surges and if artists will release tracks geared to capitalize on this holiday.

Year over year, the 3 most streamed independence day tracks (Party In The U.S.A., Born in the U.S.A., and Chicken Fried) saw huge gains from 2022 to 2023, with Party In The U.S.A. clocking in north of 1.1 million daily streams on July 4th, a 76.8% increase from the previous year. In total, the top 3 streamers had a 49.9% increase this year over the total from 2022, signaling that independence day anthems could become increasingly popular in years to come in order to secure a consistent income stream (literally).

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