Egypt’s Spotify Top 200 Showed 235 Recordings in 70 Days. South Africa’s Showed 609 From the Same 200 Slots

Spotify publishes a daily Top 200 for four African markets. Read every one of them on 70 collection dates between 16 August and 27 October 2026, 56,000 chart positions in total, and Egypt’s chart showed 235 different recordings across the whole period. South Africa’s showed 609 from the same 200 slots on the same days. Morocco’s showed 412 and Nigeria’s 506. These are not four charts of different sizes. They are four charts of identical size that disagree by a factor of 2.59 about how much music a country’s listeners are shown.

The measurement is a count and nothing else. A recording is identified by its Spotify track ID, so the same song listed under two slightly different title strings is counted once. Nothing is weighted by streams, by origin or by popularity. The question asked of each chart is narrow and literal: how many separate pieces of music would a listener who opened the national Top 200 every day for ten weeks actually have seen?

Each chart has the same 200 slots on the same 70 days. The bar is how many different Spotify track IDs passed through them.

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Show the numbers

Market	Distinct tracks, top 200, 70 dates
South Africa	609
Nigeria	506
Morocco	412
Egypt	235

Source: Spotify daily Top 200 country charts for Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa, read daily from the kworb.net mirror by this desk, retrieved 27 Oct 2026 · download the data

Egypt’s chart is close to static, and it is static at every depth#

Egypt’s Top 200 took in 5.69 new entries a day across the 67 clean transition days in the record, which is 2.8 per cent of the chart replaced in a day. Its biggest single day of intake in ten weeks was 12 entries. Of the 235 recordings that appeared at all, 90 appeared on every one of the 70 dates, and only 11 appeared on exactly one date. The mean recording in Egypt’s chart was present on 44.1 of the 70 dates, and the 200 entries sitting on the chart on 27 October had been there for a mean of 55.7 consecutive collection dates.

That stability is visible in the names. Marwan Pablo’s “Shoft Kalam”, with Lege-Cy and HatemBas, held all 70 dates at a mean position of 2.2 and reached number 1. TUL8TE’s COLORS session “Garee2a Awy” held all 70 at a mean of 3.6, also reaching number 1. حمو المرشدي’s “اركب الدبابه” held all 70 at a mean of 5.3 and peaked at 3. Three records sat in the top five of a national chart, essentially without moving, for ten weeks.

South Africa takes in 26.75 new entries a day. Egypt takes 5.69#

South Africa’s chart behaves like a different instrument. It replaced 13.4 per cent of itself on an average day, 26.75 entries, and on its heaviest day it swapped out 52 of 200 positions. Of its 609 recordings, 104 appeared on exactly one date and were never seen again, and only 64 held all 70 dates, the smallest persistent core of the four markets. The mean recording lasted 22.9 dates against Egypt’s 44.1, and the entries sitting on the chart on 27 October had a mean unbroken run of 31.1 dates against Egypt’s 55.7.

South Africa’s long holds exist, they are just rarer and they sit right at the top. Tman Xpress’s “Remember”, with Mellow & Sleazy, held all 70 dates at a mean position of 2.0. Thatohatsi’s “Ama hem hem”, with Sjava and Shaunmusiq, held all 70 at a mean of 3.1. G-Jealous’s “Luqale sakudlala” held all 70 at a mean of 4.9. All three touched number 1 inside the record. Underneath them the chart is a turnstile.

At the top of the chart the ranking flips, and Nigeria is the restless one#

The headline count is a whole-chart number, and the whole chart is not where careers are made. Repeat the count at a depth of 50 positions and South Africa stops leading: Nigeria showed 158 different recordings there against South Africa’s 148, Morocco’s 105 and Egypt’s 66. Repeat it at a depth of 10 and the gap opens properly. Nigeria showed 51 different recordings in its top 10 in ten weeks. South Africa showed 30, Morocco 24, and Egypt 18. Put another way, 10.1 per cent of everything that reached Nigeria’s chart at all got into the top 10, against 4.9 per cent in South Africa.

The two measures point in opposite directions because the churn sits at different depths. The mean new entry arrived at position 154.2 in South Africa and 159.8 in Nigeria, against 173.7 in Morocco and 179.3 in Egypt. South Africa’s turnover is concentrated in the lower reaches of its chart, where a track can arrive, hold a position in the 180s for a day and disappear. Nigeria’s turnover reaches the part of the chart people look at. Nigeria also holds only 81 recordings across all 70 dates, fewer than Morocco’s 101 or Egypt’s 90, despite showing 506 recordings in total against Egypt’s 235.

Nigeria’s own persistent core is the familiar list. Davido’s “B4 B4”, with Mayorkun and FOLA, held all 70 dates at a mean position of 5.4 and reached number 1. Seyi Vibez’s “GTA” held all 70 at a mean of 5.2 and peaked at 2. Asake’s “Gratitude” held all 70 at a mean of 6.6 and also peaked at 2. Those three are the exception in a chart that sent 51 separate recordings through its top 10 in the same period.

What would have to be true for this to be wrong#

The obvious objection is that a ten-week window flatters whichever market happened to have a quiet quarter. So the count was recomputed over five date windows and once on a different identity basis. Egypt is lowest and South Africa highest in every one of the six. The ratio between them moves between 1.82 and 2.59, and it never approaches 1. The narrowest reading, 1.82, comes from abandoning track IDs and counting distinct artist and title strings instead, which inflates Egypt from 235 to 337 because Arabic-script titles are transliterated inconsistently by the source. That is the scenario most hostile to the finding, and the finding survives it.

The second objection is that South Africa’s number is a handful of freak days. It is not. Across the 67 transition days South Africa took 1,792 new entries. Drop its single heaviest day and the total falls to 1,740. Drop the three heaviest and it is 1,641. Drop the five heaviest and the total across the 62 days that remain is 1,549, a daily mean of 24.98 against Egypt’s 5.69. The ordering of the four markets does not change in any of those scenarios.

The distinct-track column itself is concentrated in exactly the way the headline says it is, and that is worth stating rather than hiding. The four markets show 1,762 recordings between them. South Africa alone is 34.56 per cent of that. Drop South Africa and the total falls 34.56 per cent. Drop the three largest and 235 is what is left, which is Egypt, which is the point.

Three limits are structural and no scenario fixes them. Chart presence is not consumption: a recording outside a market’s top 200 is invisible to this count no matter how much it is played, so a market whose listening is spread thinly across a long tail will look emptier than it is, and a market where attention concentrates will look fuller. The run lengths are censored at 70 because the record does not reach further back, so a track that has been on Egypt’s chart since June reads the same here as one that arrived on 16 August. And four markets is not Africa. Spotify publishes no daily chart for the rest of the continent, so nothing in this piece says anything at all about turnover in Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania or Algeria. Two collection dates were also dropped from the turnover arithmetic and named in the method box: 17 August, where the source returned the previous day’s chart unchanged in Morocco and Nigeria, and 16 October, the first reading after a three-day gap.

What a release plan does with this#

The practical content is that the same chart position costs different things in different markets, and the cost is legible in advance. In South Africa a debut is cheap and a hold is expensive. The chart admits 26.75 new entries a day at a mean arrival position of 154.2, so getting onto it is a realistic target for a release with modest first-week support. Keeping it is the hard part: 104 of 609 recordings managed exactly one day, and 64 lasted the full 70. An artist planning to use a South African chart placement as evidence should assume the evidence is one screenshot, and should plan the campaign that converts that screenshot into something durable before the placement happens, not after.

In Egypt the arithmetic inverts. A debut is scarce, 5.69 slots a day with 12 as the ceiling in ten weeks, and arrivals come in at a mean position of 179.3, right at the bottom. But the 235 recordings that got in held a mean of 44.1 dates. Egypt is a market where the entry cost is the whole cost, and where catalogue, not release cadence, is the asset. A label working Egypt should budget for a longer, more expensive push to clear the threshold and should then expect that position to keep paying without further spend.

Nigeria is the one market of the four where the visible part of the chart is genuinely contestable. Its top 10 showed 51 separate recordings in ten weeks, against Egypt’s 18. For an artist whose plan depends on a top-10 placement being reachable rather than permanently occupied by three records, that number is the one to put in the pitch deck, and it is a number about Nigeria’s chart rather than about Nigeria’s streaming volume, which is a different question this desk measures separately.