When Beats 1 launched earlier this summer, two of the things Apple and its hosts were adamant about were that the station had no specific genre and that it was meant to be a global representation of music. Looking to investigate Apple’s success at following through with those goals, Quartz has analyzed all of the songs played on Beats 1 during a one month period from early July to early August…

The collected data shows that during that one month survey of the songs played on Beats 1, hip-hop was the most popular genre, with alternative coming in at a close second. Too much hip-hop has been a complaint regarding the station, with it seemingly being the preferred genre of the three flagship Beats 1 hosts. Electronic was the third most played genre, while R&B and pop round out the top 5, respectively.

Regarding specific artists, The Weeknd has been the most played artist on Beats 1 thus far, thanks in large part to his two major hits in “The Hills” and “Can’t Feel My Face,” the latter of which he performed at WWDC following Apple’s unveiling of Apple Music. The second most played artist is Drake, who of course came on stage during WWDC to vouch for Apple Music and hosts his own Beats 1 show. Disclosure comes in as third most played artist, with Fetty Wap and Jamie xx finishing out the top 5.

Finally, regarding the top played songs, The Weeknd is again on top thanks to “Can’t Feel My Face.” Halsey’s track “New Americana” has been the second top played track, while Selena Gomez holds the third spot with “Good For You.”

Beats 1 has something that is rare in the world of digital music: scarcity. Listeners can’t choose a song and play it over and over. (They can do that elsewhere on Apple Music.) But curation doesn’t mean songs aren’t repeated. We counted 12,445 tracks but only 3,371 unique songs, meaning each track was played an average of 3.7 times. Eighteen of the 20 songs in the table above were played over 50 times.

The data collected by Quartz is interesting in the fact that it shows that despite Apple wanting to not be like every other radio station and play the hit songs, it is still, in some cases, doing that. But in Apple’s defense, playing the cliché top songs is how it can gain certain demographics, specifically the younger teen crowd. Something important to note, however, is that Apple and its Beats 1 hosts are still doing a good job of playing a wide variety of tracks, with a quarter of the songs played during Quartz’s data collection only being played once. More in Quartz’s full report here

Top image via AP

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