By The Numbers: Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Loneliest Time’ TikTok Trend

She came back for us baby – one of the first benefactors of a viral music video is back 10 years later.

10 years after “Call Me Maybe” ascended to the top of the Hot 100 on the back of a viral celebrity video featuring Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, and more, Carly Rae Jepsen has come back for us, baby. The title track of her latest studio album, “The Loneliest Time,” has become a TikTok sensation, ascending to #2 on the TikTok songs chart.

TikTok

Originally posted the day the song was released, the promotional TikTok video for “The Loneliest Time” caught steam rather quickly with 530,000 plays on day one, and 1.5k videos using the song’s audio within 48 hours. By comparison, the lead single “Western Wind” released back in May has 300 videos using the sound to date. By October 14th, Jepsen has endorsed the trend, filming a clip video chatting with her cat. In the weeks since, that original promotional video has accumulated 12.5M views and 1.5M likes, while the song has steadily been adding approximately 10k videos daily, for 130k posts thus far.

Carly Rae Jepsen’s TikTok account has also seen a boon as a result – on the day of the song’s release, her profile had a respectable 270,700 followers. As of November 3, Jepsen’s account has 458,400 and growing, a 69.4% increase in less than a month.

Playlisting

Upon release, “The Loneliest Time” was added to numerous Spotify curatorial playlists, with an initial reach of 14M. After new release placements like New Music Friday filtered out the following week, that reach was cut by more than half to 6.5M. As the trend began to take shape, however, the song began picking up new placements, including ‘Good Vibes‘ (3M), ‘Pop Rising‘ (2.7M), and ‘big on the internet‘ (2.7M) in the last week. With a reach today of 19M users, the song is now racking up hundreds of thousands of streams a week from these lists, positioning the track to have longevity and outstream the other album singles.

On other DSPs, a similar story takes shape – a week after release on Amazon, “Loneliest Time” had just two curatorial placements, but now boasts fifteen, including ‘Viral Hits‘ since October 27th. Apple Music’s support of Jepsen by comparison has been rather consistent, but they also added the song to its ‘Viral Hits‘ playlist on October 25th.

Streaming

And here’s where the money is – streaming. The song racked up just over 221,000 Spotify plays on its first day, bottoming out at 103,000 plays on October 11. Since then, it has grown considerably in streaming. The song is now good for as many as 467,000 daily streams on the platform and has just under 7M plays as of November 3. On YouTube, the video had only 160,000 views after a week. However, starting on October 17th, the video began growing and is consistently adding about 100,000 streams a day for a total of 1.8M views. Across all platforms, the song has surpassed 10M streams, generating around $30,000 in royalties.^[1]Calculated by applying Spotify’s reported royalty payout rate of approximately $.00318 per stream to 10,000,000 streams – other DSPs pay out slightly more or less than this figure.

Takeaways

After the first three singles performed modestly, “The Loneliest Time’s” unexpected success has given the album a shot in the arm when it needed it most. By the end of next week, “Time” should become the most streamed album track on Spotify, surpassing “Western Wind’s” six-month tally in just one, despite “Wind” also having an initial playlist reach of 30M. Had TikTok not provided immense exposure for the track and a reason for DSPs to playlist it, the song likely would have done millions less in streaming. While the full impact of the trend on the single and album’s performance may not be fully discernable yet, it’s undoubtedly an exciting moment for Jepsen, her team, and her stans.

Explore

Explore our dashboard below and see for yourself how this new trend has shaken out across the internet!