{"id":9268,"slug":"shazam-apple-discovery-gap-summary-2026","title":"Shazam versus Apple Music songs chart overlap in 15 African markets, headline measures, 16 August to 6 November 2026","source":"This desk's own Shazam and Apple Music daily chart collection (afw_chart_snapshot \/ afw_chart_entry)","source_url":"","source_type":"computed","method":"Population: every date on which this desk's chart store holds both a Shazam song chart and an Apple Music songs chart for the same African market, 16 August to 6 November 2026, giving 1044 paired market-days across 15 markets. Apple's songs chart is exactly 100 positions in every one of these markets and Shazam's is 200, so Shazam is truncated to its top 100 before any comparison, making both windows 100 slots wide. Titles are matched on a normalised string: Unicode decomposed and accent-stripped, lowercased, parenthesised or trailing featured-artist credits removed, all remaining punctuation reduced to single spaces. A Shazam slot counts as same-day overlap if its normalised title is anywhere in that market's Apple songs top 100 on that same date, and as never-charting if it is absent from that market's Apple songs top 100 on every date the store holds, including dates with no Shazam chart, which makes the never-charting count conservative. Percentages are computed in this dataset, not in prose. This table carries the panel totals and the two derived shares quoted in the piece, plus an upper bound on title-matching error: for every unmatched Shazam title, the matcher re-checks every Apple title on that market-day for a token-set overlap of 80 per cent or more of the shorter title, and the share of unmatched titles with any such near-match is reported as the false-negative bound. Reviewer check, recorded here because it is quoted in the piece: the whole measurement was repeated with a strict title normalisation that strips no featured-artist credit and deletes all punctuation instead of reducing it to spaces, which merges slightly fewer titles and yields 104,194 Shazam slots. It returns a higher never-charting share than the published matcher, so the published figure is the conservative of the two.","unit":"count","license":"Afrobeats Wire's compilation and analysis are licensed CC BY 4.0. Rights in the underlying source data remain with the source named above.","confidence":"high","retrieved":"2026-11-06 07:56:07","n":20,"first_party":0,"columns":[{"key":"metric","label":"Measure","type":"text"},{"key":"value","label":"Value","type":"number"}],"rows":[{"metric":"African markets with both a Shazam and an Apple Music songs chart","value":15},{"metric":"Of those markets, number with no Spotify daily chart","value":11},{"metric":"Collection dates covered","value":80},{"metric":"Paired market-days measured","value":1044},{"metric":"Shazam top-100 chart slots measured","value":103990},{"metric":"Slots whose recording was on the same market\u2019s Apple songs top 100 the same day","value":24710},{"metric":"Same-day overlap, %","value":23.76},{"metric":"Slots whose recording never entered that market\u2019s Apple songs top 100 on any measured date","value":67852},{"metric":"Never-charting share of Shazam slots, %","value":65.25},{"metric":"Distinct market-and-title pairs on Shazam","value":6394},{"metric":"Distinct market-and-title pairs that never entered Apple songs top 100","value":5077},{"metric":"Never-charting share of distinct market-title pairs, %","value":79.4},{"metric":"Never-charting titles whose artist is absent from that Apple chart entirely, %","value":86.39},{"metric":"Upper bound on title-matching false negatives, %","value":2.66},{"metric":"Positions in each market\u2019s Apple Music songs chart","value":100},{"metric":"Positions in each market\u2019s Shazam song chart before truncation","value":200},{"metric":"Of those markets, number with a Spotify daily chart","value":4},{"metric":"Shazam slots measured under a strict title match (reviewer check)","value":104194},{"metric":"Never-charting share under a strict title match, % (reviewer check)","value":66.08},{"metric":"Same-day overlap under a strict title match, % (reviewer check)","value":23.3}]}