How the chart is compiled.

What is measured

One number: Spotify’s monthly listener count, which is the number of distinct accounts that played an artist in the preceding 28 days. It is read from each artist’s public Spotify page. Followers and popularity are recorded alongside it but do not affect position.

Monthly listeners are not play counts and not revenue. An artist with a single very widely played song can outrank a deeper catalogue, and the chart makes no claim beyond the measure itself.

How often it updates

Readings are taken on a rolling schedule that works through the roster, so most artists are read about once a day. The published chart is recomputed at most once an hour, and only when someone asks for it.

A day’s figure for an artist is the mean of every reading taken that day, not the last one. A day that was read once and a day that was read six times therefore contribute a single, comparable point, and no individual reading stands in for the day.

Most recent reading: 11:02, 19 August 2026 (East Africa Time).

Days with no reading

If no reading was taken for an artist on a given day, that day is left empty. It is never filled in from the days around it and never treated as zero, so a gap on an artist’s chart means “not measured” rather than “measured as nothing”.

Who counts as Kenyan

Nationality is confirmed by a person, not inferred from genre tags or from where an artist charts. Every artist sits in one of three states: confirmed Kenyan, confirmed not Kenyan, or not yet reviewed.

Artists awaiting review still appear on the chart. Hiding them would quietly understate the chart while a decision was pending, and an artist who has not been looked at yet is not the same thing as an artist who has been ruled out.

Positions and periods

The chart is ranked on each artist’s closing value: their daily figure on the most recent day they were read. Where two artists tie, the earlier position goes to whichever is stable across reads, so the order does not shuffle between identical requests.

Choosing a period changes the comparison, not the ranking. “This month” ranks artists as they stand now and reports movement against where they stood at the end of last month. Periods are not averaged: averaging a period would push down an artist who climbed through it, because their weaker early days would be counted against them, while flattering one whose only readings came after a release.

Corrections

Chart positions are never stored. Every position, including every historical one, is recalculated from the readings each time the chart is built.

That has a deliberate consequence: correcting an artist’s nationality corrects the whole history at once. If an artist is found not to be Kenyan, they are removed from every past day of the chart, not just from today, and everyone who had been ranked below them moves up accordingly. There is no archive of positions that can drift out of step with what is known now.

Limits

The chart reflects Spotify only. It says nothing about airplay, YouTube, Boomplay, Audiomack, or live audiences, and Spotify’s share of listening in Kenya is not uniform across genres or age groups. An artist absent from the chart may simply not be measured by it.

An artist who stops being read drops off rather than holding a stale position indefinitely.