28,428 of 32,400 Deezer top-100 slots in Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa, 87.74 per cent, belong to songs that never appear anywhere on Spotify’s top 200 for that same country on that same day. The gap barely narrows at the very top of the chart: restricted to Deezer’s own top 10, 79.54 per cent still never shows up on Spotify’s chart that day. This is measured across 324 paired market-days, 16 August to 7 November 2026, matching titles and artists after stripping punctuation and case.
4 markets both services chart, 324 paired market-days, 16 August to 7 November 2026
Show the numbers
| Market | Never matched, % |
|---|---|
| South Africa | 93.58 |
| Morocco | 91.19 |
| Egypt | 85.16 |
| Nigeria | 81.04 |
Source: InterSpace Distribution panel collector, Deezer and Spotify daily chart snapshots, retrieved 7 Nov 2026 · download the data
| # | Market | Deezer top-100 slots | Matched on Spotify same day | Never on Spotify same day | Never matched, % | Top-10 never matched, % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | South Africa | 8,100 | 520 | 7,580 | 93.58 | 76.17 |
| 2 | Morocco | 8,100 | 714 | 7,386 | 91.19 | 85.43 |
| 3 | Egypt | 8,100 | 1,202 | 6,898 | 85.16 | 77.90 |
| 4 | Nigeria | 8,100 | 1,536 | 6,564 | 81.04 | 78.64 |
Source: InterSpace Distribution panel collector, Deezer and Spotify daily chart snapshots, retrieved 7 Nov 2026 · download the data
Spotify and Deezer are the only two services in this desk’s panel that publish a daily songs chart for African markets and also compete for the same subscribers in those markets. Spotify’s African coverage is 4 countries: Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa. All 4 sit inside Deezer’s wider 9-country African footprint, which also reaches Algeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Senegal and Tunisia, markets where Spotify publishes no chart at all and where Deezer’s top 100 is therefore the only daily visibility signal that exists in this panel.
Where the two services do overlap, they mostly disagree about what is popular. Nigeria has the highest agreement of the four, and it is still low: 81.04 per cent of its Deezer slots never surface on Spotify’s chart the same day. South Africa has the least agreement of the four, 93.58 per cent never matched. Egypt and Morocco sit between those two.
A collector fault was the first thing to rule out: a feed that silently re-serves the same cached page would show the same ordering day after day and manufacture a spurious disagreement. It did not. Fingerprinting each market’s run of Deezer snapshots, position-ordered titles against alphabetised title membership, found a chart that is genuinely re-ranking, not a stuck feed, in every one of Deezer’s 9 African markets.
| # | Market | Snapshots | Distinct orderings | Distinct memberships |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Egypt | 81 | 77 | 77 |
| 2 | Morocco | 81 | 77 | 77 |
| 3 | Nigeria | 81 | 77 | 77 |
| 4 | South Africa | 82 | 78 | 78 |
| 5 | Cote d'Ivoire | 82 | 78 | 78 |
| 6 | Algeria | 81 | 77 | 77 |
| 7 | Kenya | 81 | 77 | 77 |
| 8 | Senegal | 82 | 78 | 78 |
| 9 | Tunisia | 81 | 77 | 77 |
Source: InterSpace Distribution panel collector, Deezer daily chart snapshots, retrieved 7 Nov 2026 · download the data
What this measures is narrower than it might sound. A title can fail to match for reasons that have nothing to do with taste: Deezer and Spotify do not necessarily hold identical licences in every market, a track can be pulled from one service and not the other, and featured-artist billing sometimes differs between services on the same recording. The matching rule used here strips punctuation and case but requires both title and artist to agree, which is the strict end of what a reasonable person would call the same song. Running the loosest defensible alternative, matching on title alone and ignoring the artist entirely, moves the never-matched share from 87.74 per cent to 86.63 per cent. The finding does not depend on how strictly “the same song” is defined.
| # | Matching rule | Deezer top-100 slots | Matched on Spotify same day | Matched, % | Never matched, % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Title and artist (reported figure) | 32,400 | 3,972 | 12.26 | 87.74 |
| 2 | Title only, artist ignored (loosest possible bound) | 32,400 | 4,332 | 13.37 | 86.63 |
Source: InterSpace Distribution panel collector, Deezer and Spotify daily chart snapshots, retrieved 7 Nov 2026 · download the data
The other way to break the finding is to ask whether one market is carrying it. It is not. Excluding South Africa, the market with the single largest count of never-matched slots, drops the four-market total by only 26.66 per cent; excluding the three largest markets and leaving only Nigeria still drops the total by 76.91 per cent. No single country’s chart behaviour explains the disagreement; it holds, at different intensities, in all four.
| # | Scenario | Rows | Total | Largest row share, % | Change in total, % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | All rows | 4 | 28,428 | 26.66 | 0 |
| 2 | Excluding the top 1 (South Africa) | 3 | 20,848 | 35.43 | -26.66 |
| 3 | Excluding the top 3 (South Africa, Morocco, Egypt) | 1 | 6,564 | 100 | -76.91 |
Source: Recomputed from deezer-spotify-chart-agreement-4-markets-2026, retrieved 7 Nov 2026 · download the data
For an artist or an independent label, the practical read is that a Spotify chart position is not a proxy for popularity on a competing service in the same country, and the reverse holds too: of Spotify’s own 64,800 slots across the same four markets and the same 324 days, only 8.49 per cent appear on Deezer’s top 100 the same day, a lower share again because Spotify is dividing twice as many daily slots against the same pool of songs. An artist, label or distributor reading only one chart in a market is reading one service’s audience, not the market. In the 5 countries where Deezer charts and Spotify does not, Algeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Senegal and Tunisia, there is no second chart to check against at all; Deezer’s number is the only public daily signal this panel has for what is playing there.
