Jakarta and Yogyakarta: Cities Musical Characters in Spotify Chart

Spotify provides two panels that are often read interchangeably, even though they answer different questions.

According to Spotify's official documentation (2026), City Charts are ranked by playback popularity within a specific city, while Local Pulse surfaces songs that are relatively more popular in that city compared to their overall popularity elsewhere.

In other words, City Charts answers the question: what is most listened to in Jakarta? Local Pulse answers a different question: which songs have a concentration of plays in Jakarta that exceeds that song's popularity in general?

The distinction looks minor on the surface, but it shapes every reading that follows. Because the two panels use different sorting bases, a high position on Local Pulse does not automatically mean the song also has the highest play count in Jakarta. Both conditions can hold true at the same time without canceling each other out.

Local Pulse already factors relative comparison into its calculation. Because of this, Jakarta's position on that panel can be read as a signal of relative distinctiveness, without treating other cities' lists as part of the dataset analyzed in this article.

City Charts, the panel that ranks the most-played songs in a given city, shows substantial overlap between the two cities. Ten of the 13 unique songs that made Jakarta's top ten over the seven weeks of observation also appeared in Yogyakarta's top ten. Only three songs did not appear in Yogyakarta: "Bahagia Lagi" by Piche Kota, "Monolog" by Pamungkas, and "Titik Nadir" by Kahitna feat. Monita Tahalea.

The two most prominent songs even held identical positions in both cities. "Sesi Potret" by eńau and Ari Lesmana held the number one spot for seven consecutive weeks in both Jakarta and Yogyakarta, with a chart streak reaching 22 weeks in Jakarta and 20 weeks in Yogyakarta as of August 13. "everything u are" by Hindia had the longest running streak in both cities: 74 weeks in Jakarta and 75 weeks in Yogyakarta.

The pattern was similarly stable in terms of new entries. Yogyakarta had 14 unique songs on City Charts across the observation period, with four new entries after the July 2 baseline: "Teh Hijau," "Dunia Yang Nanti," "Jatuh Suka," and "Astaga Bercanda." Jakarta had 13 unique songs, with three new entries: "Teh Hijau," "Dunia Yang Nanti," and "Titik Nadir." The three songs distinctive to Yogyakarta that never entered Jakarta's top ten were "bergema sampai selamanya" (Nadhif Basalamah), "33x" (Perunggu), and "Jatuh Suka" (Tulus).

The conclusion from this part is clear. Most of the music popular in Jakarta is also popular in Yogyakarta, and vice versa. The main chart is capturing something real, not an artifact specific to a single city.

Local Pulse tells a very different story. Of Jakarta's 20 unique Local Pulse songs and Yogyakarta's 16 unique Local Pulse songs, not a single title appeared on both lists. Zero overlap, between two cities that both sit on the island of Java and are relatively close to one another.

"Teh Hijau" illustrates exactly how this panel is designed to work. The song appeared on Jakarta's City Charts, Jakarta's Local Pulse, and Yogyakarta's City Charts, but never once on Yogyakarta's Local Pulse. A song that has already become broadly popular in many places tends to drop off the list of "uniquely popular" tracks for any single city, because Local Pulse is built to measure the gap between local popularity and overall global popularity, not popularity that is already evenly spread.

A similar pattern shows up within a single city. In Jakarta, the overlap between City Charts and Local Pulse is not zero: one song, "Teh Hijau," appeared on both panels. In Yogyakarta, that overlap is exactly zero. Not one of the 16 unique songs on Yogyakarta's Local Pulse ever appeared in Yogyakarta's City Charts top ten during the same period.

Yogyakarta's Local Pulse also has a pattern of its own. Only two songs remained on the list without interruption across all seven weeks of observation: "Pamit Rabi" (Lavora, Ajeng Febria) and "Laut Kidul" as performed by Denny Caknan with Hendra Kumbara. There are two songs sharing the same title by different artists that appeared side by side for nearly the entire period: "Laut Kidul" by Denny Caknan & Hendra Kumbara, and "Laut Kidul" by Nayla Fardila. "Sumpah Galaxy" held the number one spot for the first two weeks, disappeared for four consecutive weeks, then reentered directly at number one on August 13.

Jakarta's Local Pulse also showed an extreme shift in position. "I Miss You Every Brand New Day" by For Revenge jumped from position 49 to position 2 in a single week on August 6, the largest single-week rise in the observation period, coinciding with the song's association with the film Spider-Man: Brand New Day. This song was not recorded at all on either of Yogyakarta's panels during the same period.

The stark difference above stems from how each panel is defined. According to Spotify's official documentation (2026), City Charts are ranked by playback popularity within a city, while Local Pulse surfaces songs that are relatively more popular in that city compared to their overall popularity elsewhere.

City Charts answers the question of what is most listened to in that particular city. Local Pulse answers a different question: which songs have a concentration of plays in that city exceeding that song's popularity in general. A high position on Local Pulse does not mean the song has the highest play count in that city. Both conditions hold true simultaneously without contradicting each other.

The more general a panel is, the greater the likelihood of overlap across cities. City Charts, which is purely about play volume, repeated 10 of Jakarta's 13 songs in Yogyakarta. Local Pulse, which already factors relative comparison into its calculation, produced zero overlap for the same pair of cities. The more distinctive a panel is, the smaller the chance of overlap, whether across panels within a single city or across cities on the same panel.

The song "Astaga Bercanda," for instance, shows how a single song can hold entirely different positions in two cities. In Jakarta, the song appeared on Local Pulse but never made the City Charts top ten. Its run there was brief, only two weeks (July 30 and August 6), before dropping out of the top ten on August 13. In Yogyakarta, its position was reversed: the song entered the City Charts top ten on August 13 at position 10, after climbing five spots from position 15, yet it never once appeared on Yogyakarta's Local Pulse.

One song, one genre, but charting in completely different ways in two cities. For lineup scouting or campaign timing, a song's level of adoption needs to be checked city by city, rather than assumed to be uniform from a single data point.

IDN Research Institute coded the genre of all 32 unique songs across Jakarta's two lists. Jakarta's City Charts (13 songs) fell entirely into pop or indie/alternative: 7 pop, 6 indie/alternative. Jakarta's Local Pulse (20 songs) was far more varied: 9 pop, 3 hipdut, 2 hip-hop/rap, 2 indie/alternative, 2 dance/electronic, 1 Christian worship, 1 folk.

Of the 13 unique songs that made the City Top Tracks during the observation period, all fell within the pop or indie/alternative category. One of them was classified more specifically as pop ballad. The names filling this list recur throughout: Hindia, Sal Priadi, Perunggu, Pamungkas, Nadhif Basalamah, Tulus, Kahitna, Raim Laode.

In this dataset, the Local Pulse top 10 list has a more varied genre mix than the City Top Tracks. This is most visible in the appearance of hipdut, hip-hop/rap, dance/electronic, Christian worship, and electronic pop, none of which appear among the 13 unique City Top Tracks songs. Nine of the twenty Local Pulse songs fall outside the pop and indie/alternative categories.

For Yogyakarta, genre classification was carried out independently based on each artist's profile and each song's musical character. Because this method differs from the coding used for Jakarta, the figures for the two cities are used to read genre patterns rather than to directly compare genre proportions.

The "local" genre in these two cities is made up of entirely different content. Jakarta's Local Pulse leans toward hipdut, hip-hop/rap, dance/electronic, Christian worship, and folk, all outside the pop and indie/alternative dominance seen on City Charts. Yogyakarta's Local Pulse is split almost evenly between two genre clusters: music rooted in Javanese culture, namely dangdut koplo and hipdut, accounting for 10 of 16 songs, and independent rock, punk, and pop punk from the city itself, represented by Fstvlst, The Kick, The Cloves and The Tobacco, and COLORCODE, accounting for 6 of 16 songs.

Even the hipdut genre differs between the two cities. Citing the Indonesia Gen-Z Millennial Report 2027 published by IDN Research Institute, Jakarta's hipdut grew out of a more recent digital-native trend, popularized by Jemsii, Tenxi, and Naykilla, with the song "Garam & Madu (Sakit Dadaku)," released in December 2024 and formally recognized at the AMI Awards in November 2025. Yogyakarta's hipdut has existed for far longer, popularized by NDX A.K.A. since 2011 in Bantul, with Pendhoza and other Javanese dangdut koplo artists continuing the style. Both cities have hipdut on their Local Pulse charts, but through entirely different artists and histories.

Note: Yogyakarta's genre classification was compiled from each artist's profile and press coverage (Kompasiana, Tempo, RRI, Indonesian-language Wikipedia, IDN Times Jogja, Republika, artists' official Spotify and YouTube channels), accessed August 2026.

City Charts and Local Pulse should not be treated as two versions of the same ranking, nor can they be read as one combined list covering Jakarta and Yogyakarta together. City Charts helps identify songs and artists with proven popularity in a given city. Local Pulse helps identify songs, artists, and genres that are relatively more distinctive to that city, and the results differ from one city to another.

Four takeaways can be drawn from the data above.

First, the purpose of an event determines which chart to consult, and the pattern is more pronounced in Yogyakarta than in Jakarta. In Jakarta, 12 of the 13 City Charts songs did not appear on Jakarta's Local Pulse. In Yogyakarta, not a single one of the 14 City Charts songs appeared on Yogyakarta's Local Pulse. For an event aiming for mass familiarity across both cities at once, the City Charts of both cities can be used together, since they overlap on 10 of 13 songs. For an event that wants a strong local identity, a single Local Pulse list cannot be used for both cities, since Jakarta's Local Pulse and Yogyakarta's Local Pulse do not overlap at all.

Second, artist recurrence is useful for scouting, but it shows up differently in the two cities. In Jakarta, recurrence happens across panels. Raim Laode placed three songs at once in Jakarta's City Charts top ten on August 6, 2026: "iqro'" at number three, "Dunia Yang Nanti" at number four, and "Bersenja Gurau" at number nine. eńau appeared on both Jakarta's City Charts and Local Pulse through different collaborations, "Sesi Potret" and "Sudah Tahu Tuhan Kita Berbeda," and so did Ari Lesmana. In Yogyakarta, recurrence happens within Local Pulse itself, rather than across panels, since no Yogyakarta Local Pulse artist also appears on Yogyakarta's City Charts. Fstvlst placed two songs on Yogyakarta's Local Pulse, "Sumpah Galaxy" and "Doa Lamat-Lamat." Nayla Fardila also appeared with two songs, "Laut Kidul" and "Pelampiasan 2 1/2." The Cloves and The Tobacco placed two songs, "Di Sela Waktu Tersisa" and "Tentang Kau Dan Dirimu." This pattern suggests Yogyakarta's independent musicians have a dense enough listener base to consistently appear on Local Pulse, even without ever reaching the city's main chart.

Third, genres absent from City Charts expand the scope of a potential lineup, but their content is city-specific. The additional genres on Jakarta's Local Pulse are hipdut, hip-hop/rap, dance/electronic, Christian worship, and folk, five genres beyond the pop and indie/alternative dominance seen in Jakarta's City Charts. In Yogyakarta, since the overlap between City Charts and Local Pulse is zero, all 16 Local Pulse songs sit outside the city's main chart, and their genres split almost evenly between music rooted in Javanese culture (dangdut koplo and hipdut, 10 of 16 songs) and the city's independent rock, punk, and pop punk scene (6 of 16 songs). Scouting for Jakarta needs to add urban and digital-native genre categories. Scouting for Yogyakarta needs to consider two directions at once, music rooted in Javanese culture and the city's independent scene, two groups that likely also draw different audiences.

Local Pulse remains an indication of relative distinctiveness, not a direct measure of how well an artist fits an event. Lineup selection still requires other considerations such as audience scale, demographic fit, booking cost, artist availability, and event concept. Still, for these two cities, City Charts and Local Pulse are best read as two separate data sources per city: City Charts to see who is already big, Local Pulse to find who and what makes a lineup feel distinctly Jakarta or distinctly Yogyakarta.

These two charts do not show that Jakarta and Yogyakarta have two completely different musical tastes from one another. What they show is that popularity can be measured from more than one angle. One list shows the songs most listened to in a city, while the other shows the songs whose concentration of popularity is more distinctive to that city compared to their popularity overall.

This distinction matters because the most frequently played song is not always the song that best captures a city's distinctiveness, and the pattern becomes more visible once two cities are compared directly. Jakarta and Yogyakarta's City Charts overlap on 10 of 13 songs, while the two cities' Local Pulse charts do not overlap at all. Over the seven weeks observed, both cities' City Charts tended to remain stable with a narrower range of genres, while Local Pulse revealed genres and songs invisible on the main popularity list, with content that differs from city to city.

For brands, the distinction is not about which chart is "more correct," or which city's taste is more "authentic." The real question is what kind of information is being sought, and for which city. Popularity helps identify what already has broad reach, in one city or in more than one city at once. Distinctiveness helps identify what sets one city apart from another, and the answer needs to be checked separately for each city, because data from one city cannot necessarily be used as a reference for another.

References

IDN Research Institute. (2026). Indonesia Millennial and Gen Z Report 2027. IDN Media.

Spotify. (2026). Understanding Spotify Charts. Spotify for Artists. Accessed August 19, 2026, from https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/understanding-spotify-charts/

Spotify Charts. (2026). City Charts Jakarta Weekly. Accessed August 19, 2026, from https://charts.spotify.com/charts/view/citytoptrack-jakarta-weekly/latest

Spotify Charts. (2026). Local Pulse Jakarta Weekly. Accessed August 19, 2026, from https://charts.spotify.com/charts/view/citypulsetrack-jakarta-weekly/latest

Spotify Charts. (2026). City Charts Yogyakarta Weekly. Accessed August 19, 2026, from https://charts.spotify.com/charts/view/citytoptrack-yogyakarta-weekly/latest

Spotify Charts. (2026). Local Pulse Yogyakarta Weekly. Accessed August 19, 2026, from https://charts.spotify.com/charts/view/citypulsetrack-yogyakarta-weekly/latest