This month, we’re publicly releasing The Big Spreadsheet! Ever since Garbage Intelligence started in the spring of 2023, we’ve kept track of every number in a single file that’s now grown to enormous proportions. You can now finally check it out by clicking the button below.

You probably didn’t have to check that link, though, to guess that Taylor Swift’s new album The Life of a Showgirl won Spotify in October. The Fate of Ophelia had more streams in its first month — over 348 million — than any album since we started tracking data from kworb.net. And it was one of three songs off the album in Spotify’s top five, which was filled out by “Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters (220 million streams in October) and “back to friends” by Finn Wolfhard doppelganger, Sombr (156 million streams).

It’s both a completely unsurprising list and a very odd mix of genres and styles to see together. But looking at it on The Big Spreadsheet, where we can see how relatively stable the Spotify top 5 has been, and side by side with the rest of the platforms we track, it’s a surprisingly complete summary of what’s happening across the web.

We’ve speculated before about how Spotify’s dominance might have flattened the sound at the top of the charts. Music journalist and researcher Chris Dalla Riva recently wrote, “If I had to describe any sort of algorithmic bias at Spotify’s platform level, it would be toward laidback indie or alternative rock that won’t disturb you if it’s spinning in the background.”

Which is what we’ve seen, as well. Comparatively few of the hundreds of millions of streams happening every day on Spotify come from people making the active choice to listen to the new Taylor album, or kids demanding to hear Rumi hit the high note for the hundredth time. And it’s made the platform an especially strange barometer for culture. Popular songs float to the top, but to really see the downstream cultural impact of Spotify’s passive consumption, you have to go looking for it elsewhere.

Our data from Graphtreon shows that three of the most popular Patreon accounts in October were creators who paywalled their analysis of and reactions to The Life of a Showgirl. The most popular was HTHaze, a music YouTuber who was personally acknowledged by Swift last year, and who got over 3,200 new paid Patrons last month. The most conversation, though, came from fifth place, a content creator named Zachary Hourihane who goes by “Swiftologist” (2,500 Patrons). Hourihane has been part of the Taylor-industrial complex since Folklore, but the new album isn’t the only reason he got attention in October. Near the end of the month, he waded into the controversy surrounding Swift’s fellow Spotify luminary Sombr.

If you haven’t been paying attention, Sombr has kept fandom drama at a rolling boil since last month, when he personally responded to a popular TikTok criticizing his shows. Hourihane took Sombr’s side, leading to fellow music YouTuber Adam McIntyre to joke that he was being paid by Sombr, according to a Redditor’s summary of the situation. Hourihane apparently responded by taking it as a serious, defamatory accusation, repeatedly threatening legal action according to McIntyre. But to me, the most interesting part of all this is why a guy going by “Swiftologist” would, in the midst of an unprecedented attention and financial success thanks to his namesake’s new album, talk about Sombr at all.

Sombr got kudos from Swift in October, but the two musicians work in very different modes of pop and have very different audiences (which is ironically what started the drama in the first place). The strongest link between them is that they’re neighbors at the top of the Spotify charts — meaning they’re both safe bets across all the different platforms and algorithms Hourihane has to navigate when creating content. 

Which leads to the third artist in Spotify’s top five, who we can also see elsewhere on our lists. Our data from playboard.co showed the third-most-popular YouTube channel in October was called “Rumi-KPOP,” and featured simple comedy skits for kids with all the performers wearing KPop Demon Hunters cosplay. Costumes from the movie were the hottest ticket this Halloween and the film itself has shattered records for basically any movie on Netflix, but there’s a lot more going on here.

Similar cosplay skits have been popular on YouTube for months. They’ve never quite made it into our top five, though, losing to completely AI-generated videos or regional MrBeast variants. The movie gave the genre a shot in the arm. Just look at “The hand of god,” a channel that started in March and spent months making cosplay videos featuring the four pillars of Christian dogma — Jesus, the devil, Harley Quinn, and Squid Game. Since July, though, they’ve added Rumi to their repertory, to enormous success.

YouTube recently introduced measures to demonetize AI slop, and this seems to be what we have instead. Seven out of the top 50 Youtube channels in October prominently featured real people dressing up as Huntr/x and the Saja Boys, totaling 11.4 million subscribers. In just a few months, KPop Demon Hunters has gone from nonexistent to an important pillar of the platform. For perspective, that’s more channels in the top 50 than traditional media outlets like Victoria’s Secret or T-Series, though those channels combined for more subscribers.

But none of those channels can pivot entirely to a new trendy musician the same way a rando with a YouTube account can. A platform like Spotify has grind along, monetizing the background noise of all other forms of culture. And its biggest hits have to satisfy every possible level of engagement, from the stans that will exhaustively analyze every note, to a workout mix, to pure white noise to fill the silence in empty stores and autogenerated videos. Meanwhile, smaller creators, who have to ruthlessly chase the algorithm to survive, understand how much that background noise can dictate what people will want to see. And are, ultimately, who you should be paying attention to if you want to know what people actually care about.

Some Sensual Turtle Content

This was the most-watched TikTok in the US in October.

OpenAI’s Sora 2 Isn’t The Next ChatGPT

On the last day of September OpenAI released a TikTok-styled app version of Sora 2, its video generator. It’s had some growing pains, mostly related to limits over which famous people you can put into its bizarre, hyperreal, and very fetish-y videos. The app is a success, with OpenAI claiming it’s growing even faster than ChatGPT. Our data from AppFigures, though, shows it probably won’t have the same kind of complete saturation.

For a start, the app requires iOS 18 to run, meaning it’s not accessible on many older phones. For another, it’s currently only available in a few countries, and only showing up on the charts in the US (where it was the third-most-downloaded app this month on iOS). The government of Japan, though, one of the few other countries with access to the app, did officially contact OpenAI about maybe doing something about its new nightmare roulette. So who knows.

Labubu Finally Hits The Top Of TikTok

TikTok, at the highest echelons, is even more passive than Spotify. We rarely see celebrities there. Never see any huge news stories. And the only real “meme” we’ve seen enter the TikTok top five — especially after the platform seemed to turn the volume down on itself last January — was a Jet2holidays video back in the summer.

Case in point: This month was the first time a piece of Labubu-themed content entered our list. Which is kind of remarkable. Labubu dolls are the biggest TikTok trend of the year, unquestionably. But it took almost all of 2025 for a video featuring the little demonic creatures to go viral enough for us to see it. Even more notable, a Labubu doll doesn’t even feature in the video.

A good reminder that anything anyone is telling you is “popular on TikTok” is saying that because it’s popular on their TikTok.

The Democratic Civil War Is Playing Out On Bluesky

Earlier this week, we wrote that the Democratic Party is likely experiencing its own version of the Tea Party. And after Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York City this week, the Democratic Socialist wing of the party is more emboldened than ever and it’s safe to assume this will be the big story to watch as we trudge our way into the midterms next year.

Well, if you want to watch that story unfold, Bluesky is actually a great place to camp out. The accounts that grew the most on the platform this month (excluding the flagship Bluesky account, which is almost always number one) were a split right down the middle of the party. And, right now, the Dem Soc side is winning.

Our data from bluefacts.app shows the two accounts with the most growth this month were Mamdani’s (35,000 new followers) and congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, most likely thanks to the news of her federal indictment for protesting at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Chicago. Just behind them were the accounts of former President Barack Obama and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

And, consulting the Big Spreadsheet, this split has actually been the trend on Bluesky all summer. Mamdani has been in the top five for the last five months, duking it out with both Newsom and Obama.

Why Is Iggy Azalea Blowing Up On YouTube?

This one was a bit of a head-scratcher for us. Rapper Iggy Azalea had a ton of growth on YouTube over the last few weeks, coming in second this month, right behind MrBeast in terms of followers gained. (Funny enough, we counted her under “traditional media” for our pie chart above, meaning she’s the only thing keeping that category ahead of KPop Demon Hunters cosplayers.) But she hasn’t posted anything — no videos, no shorts — since August.

As we were compiling all our data for October the Azalea numbers didn’t make a ton of sense. We even checked it across a couple different platforms, just to make sure it wasn’t a glitch. Well, wouldn’t you know it: Azalea announced this week that she’s joining a crypto company called Thrust as their creative director. There was a big Twitch streamer-filled launch party for her $MOTHER coin last night.

Bots? Insiders? A mix of both? Well, all we can definitively say is literally a month ago — to the day — Azalea’s totally flat-lined YouTube channel gained about six million subscribers and then flat-lined again 👀

Facebook Is Full Of Cool Biker Content Now, Apparently

This Reel was the fourth most-interacted-with Facebook post in October, which was the third month in a row with cool bike and motorcycle content in the top list of popular Facebook content. We don’t know why lol.

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s “vessel alert.” (Just heads up, this is an X post.)

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***