The Music Business Buddy
A podcast that aims to educate and inspire music creators in their quest to achieving their goals by gaining a greater understanding of the business of music. A new episode is released each Wednesday and aims to offer clarity and insight into a range of subjects across the music industry, all through the lens of a music creator for the benefit of other music creators. The series includes soundbites and interviews with guests from all over the world together with commentary and clarity on a range of topics. The podcast is hosted by award winning music industry professional Jonny Amos.
Jonny Amos is a music producer with credits on a range of major and independent labels, a songwriter with chart success in Europe and Asia, a senior lecturer in both music creation and music business at BIMM University UK, director of The SongLab Ltd and the author of The Music Business for Music Creators.
www.jonnyamos.com
The Music Business Buddy
Episode 34: The Global Evolution of Music and Genre Trends
Lets dive into today's shifting music landscape and discover the strategic moves propelling solo artists to unprecedented success. What if you could track the rise of an artist from obscurity to the pinnacle of the industry within just a year? Join me, Jonny Amos, on the Music Business Buddy podcast as we explore compelling insights from Chartmetrics, revealing the dominance of solo acts and the remarkable ascent of Chapel Roan. We'll also highlight how industry giants like Bruno Mars, Billie Eilish, and Taylor Swift continue to hold sway, while Colombian artists are making waves worldwide.
As the music genre landscape becomes increasingly complex, with 1,691 genres charted, understanding their role in metadata and visibility is more crucial than ever. We'll break down the dominant forces of hip-hop, rap, dance, and pop, while offering a glimpse into the unique world of K-pop. Together, we'll navigate the evolving roles of platforms like Spotify and YouTube—each crucial for discovery as well as revenue—against a backdrop of 28,700 new tracks daily. Discover how streaming platforms and short-form content are reshaping how we consume and discover music today, and what it means for artists across the globe.
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The Music Business Buddy. The Music Business Buddy. Hello everybody and a very warm welcome to you. You're listening to the Music Business Buddy with me, johnny Amos, podcasting out of Birmingham in England. I'm the author of the book the Music Business for Music Creators, available in hardback, paperback, e-book format out of Birmingham in England. I'm the author of the book the Music Business for Music Creators, available in hardback, paperback, e-book format. I'm a music creator with credits on a variety of major and indie labels. As a writer-producer, I'm a senior lecturer in both music creation and music business. Wherever you are, whatever you do, consider yourself welcome to this podcast and to a part of the community.
Speaker 1:I'm here to try and educate and inspire music creators from all over the world in their quest to achieving their goals by gaining a greater understanding of the business of music. Ok, so this week, what I'm going to be doing is taking an analytical and objective viewpoint as to the state of the music industry. One of the things that I try and do in order to try and be as useful and resourceful to you as possible is to try and read a lot of different things that will inform me on stuff that I an indication as to where things might be going and then in, so that you don't have to kind of go through all that, I try and kind of chew it up and share it for you in a more succinct manner. So that's the aim of today as well. Now, the source I'm using for today is Chartmetrics. Now, if anybody is not familiar with Chartmetrics, it's basically a music analytics solution which kind of basically helps digital marketeers, music supervisors, artist managers, record companies and stuff monitor the performance of recording artists, you know. So they look for kind of key performance indicators on albums and demographics and that kind of thing. It is used by universal music group and live nation, netflix, all sorts of different industry partners, but anyone can subscribe to it. Now, one of the things, one of the many things that they do, that I find really interesting is how they use AI. So they use it in a way that's similar to many industry platforms, which is to use it in a predictive manner to predict growth on trends and artists and you know kind of who's coming through who, what are they doing, why is it, why is it they're doing it that way and what's working. So some of that kind of stuff will be used in order to analyze some of the performances of the music industry over the last year.
Speaker 1:Let's say so, let's get into it, let's have a look at the state of the industry. Here we go, okay, so what I'm doing here is going to draw some commentary on the Year in Music report by Sharp Metric. This is only the second year they've done this, by the way, but they do an extremely good report. So they kind of they track around 11 million artists, and there's a lot of different things that I could pick apart, but the first thing that kind of just leapt out to me is the number of solo artists there are currently in the world. So if we look at, if we just split between solo acts and group acts and this is kind of globally right there's everything that's under their radar um, 34 percent of the acts in the world under their 11 million radar are groups, and that could, that could be a group of, you know, two or more people, right? So duo or more. So that means that 66% of the artists that they track are solo artists. That's a lot, isn't it? I mean, that's that did surprise me a little bit, but then that does seem to kind of fall in line with a lot of the things that we see, one of the things they'll said that they did.
Speaker 1:They put a highlight on Chapel Roan. Now, if you think about this, right. So if we go back to January 2024, right so. Chapel Roan Now, if you think about this, right. So if we go back to January 2024, right. So Chapel Roan was categorised as, like a mid-level artist with Chartmetric, with a score of what they put down as 77.5. 11 months after that, her score peaked at 97.6. That's by November 2024. So that places her within the top 1% of artists that are tracked within their algorithm. That's an idea of kind of growth, you know, and there's all sorts of things that have kind of contributed to that. Obviously, the streaming data, appearances at things like Coachella, npr, tiny Desk, that kind of thing. There's kind of no surprise in terms of the top 10 artists of the world. In terms of the top 10 artists of the world Bruno Mars, billie Eilish, taylor Swift, drake, lady Gaga, justin Bieber, the Weeknd, eminem these are the kind of artists that would be globally top 10 that still are under that radar. Now, something interesting as well that I saw was that 13% of the top 500 artists in the world tracked by Chartmetric were ranked as Latin artists. So the highest rank was Carol G, who peaked at number 13. And it's been a very, very good year for a lot of Latin artists, particularly out of Colombia.
Speaker 1:Now, one of the things that we hear about is you know how many songs are released through distributors onto the likes of Apple, spotify, amazon, etc. Every single day, and it's a number that kind of just swashes itself through social media and kind of scares a lot of people. But the exact stat on Chartmetric here is 28,700 tracks released daily. 28,700 tracks, ok. So one of the highlights that stood out to me was in regards to Charlie XCX's album Bratz. Now, that was a pretty kind of defining cultural moment, especially in regards to how data is looked at. After that initial burst of release streams, the compilation of the album's remixes came out, but that album of remixes brought in over a dozen artists across various different career stages. So the track Guess, for example example featuring Billie Eilish, you know gathered something around 38 million streams in the first week, which then drove Charlie XCX's monthly listeners up from 24 million up to 46 million in just a month.
Speaker 1:Now, track duration is another thing of interest, because if we just take our minds back to kind of 2020, 2021, during the pandemic and the peak of kind of perhaps TikTok influence on music, we started to see a lot of songs shrink down in structure and form. So we saw things like intros and outros disappearing, bridges, middle eights going out of Fashion, etc. What we're starting to see now is an increase again in longer songs becoming more popular again. So, while the tracks on Spotify charts kind of did have quite a wide range of durations, chartmetric are saying that they most likely were between 251 and 309 in terms of the very, very top echelon tracks. So the shortest track was clip one by South African rapper A-Reese. It's also been a very, very big year for female pop artists. So if we take a look at someone like Sabrina Carpenter, so as of January the 1st last year that's 2024, the singer had 35 million Spotify listeners per month, and that is a number that then peaked later in the year at 86.9 million in October. So a huge year of growth there.
Speaker 1:Ok, now, one of the things I always like to look at is genre and genre definition. I talk about this quite a lot, especially when it comes to metadata, track visibility, distributors, how people categorize things. Also how artists categorize things, how distributors categorize things that can be different, and then how the DSPs categorize things, because sometimes we see Apple and Spotify, for example, categorizing things quite differently, for example, categorizing things quite differently. One of the things that we might start to see, I think, in the next year or two, are way more genre categories, especially in regards to secondary genres that fall inside of a larger primary genre group. So, you know, chart metric actually tracked a total of get this, 1691 genres.
Speaker 1:Um, that's a lot of genres. Um, no surprise to see that kind of hip-hop and rap was, uh, still number one. Um, also, especially when you think about its influence on how pop records still sound in the 2020s um, dance number two. Uh, pop. At three, alternative at four, alternative covers. So many different things, doesn't it? Five was classical, six was electro, seven indie, eight soundtrack, nine ambient and ten rock. So what we're seeing there is a kind of link between you know we talked about earlier about the number of solo artists versus number of groups. We know that we're in a kind of in in ratio, a very, very low number of groups these days. So we see rock at 10. There. That kind of makes sense. It adds up. Right now.
Speaker 1:There's also a highlight in the report on k-pop. If anybody doesn't know, generally south korea is usually around seventh or eighth biggest market in the world. It has been been there for about seven or eight years now and continues to stay around there in the kind of global charts. But it is so different from so many other genres. So, for instance, you know the sales are very physical. There's a lot of CD, dvd sales. It does export very well to the Western world, but Spotify, it's just not as much as a part of how that music is consumed. So, for example, k-pop stats look around about 25 tick tock, 25.
Speaker 1:Instagram in terms of engagement, and then youtube and spotify kind of make up the rest as the market leaders with around 15 to 20 each, which is quite different right from a lot of other genres that we might look at, especially some of the more mainstream genres like pop and hip hop. Ok, so in terms of the market leaders in the audio streaming market, it's no surprise to see Spotify at number one 61.4 billion listeners and 23.4 billion followers. 1.4 billion listeners and 23.4 billion followers. So I think that's going to grow next year, especially as we start to see more premium listeners on Spotify in South America and India. Spotify, so you know it's number one there.
Speaker 1:Of the 11 million Spotify profiles tracked on Chartmetric, only 1.58 million that's 14% have more than 10 listeners from month to month, emphasizing just how much the platform is utilized by undiscovered artists. So from that 1.58 million, 37 have more than 1 000 monthly listeners. So that gives us an idea when we go back to how many tracks are released daily. Sometimes I hear artists kind of feel a little bit down about that and I say don't worry, you know there's there's a lot of music out there that you know perhaps is not as competitive as what you make. You know the fact that you're even listening to this right now kind of puts you into the game, it tells. It tells you that you are into this, that you are trying to commit to it. Most people don't always think like that, right, you know it's good to look around and see what we can learn from everything else that's going on around us.
Speaker 1:Today's radio ecosystem is also has some stats in here. So chart metric looks currently tracks 2 860 radio stations across the world is A total of 2 million tracks were played for a combined 1 billion spins on the radio. Top artists on the radio David Guetta, Chris Brown, taylor Swift, dua Lipa, morgan Wallen, post Malone, sabrina Carpenter, the Weeknd, teddy Swims and Ed Sheeran. So it's slightly different there, right, slightly different from the top streamed artists. There's some correlation, but it doesn't always seem to add up weekend teddy swims and ed sheeran. So it's slightly different there, right, slightly different from the top streamed artists. There's some correlation, but it doesn't always seem to add up.
Speaker 1:Um, youtube, of course you can't not mention youtube on this, right. It's a cornerstone in the music industry, so it serves, as we know, as both a discovery platform and also revenue drive for artists and labels. So, across the 11 million artists tracked in their system, 6.7 million videos were posted over the course of 2024. 6.7 million videos posted Wow. So that covers everything from music videos to lyric videos, bts videos, social media shares. I wonder if it includes short form content. I don't know. I should imagine it probably does. Now, youtube stats are more global than Spotify's because they will have a higher usage of people around the world. So if we were to look at their kind of their charts, if you like? Not that many people often look at this, but I find it very interesting because it reads very differently than how Spotify does, due to the higher user bases in countries, you know, in territories like Asia and Latin America, and a higher prevalence of Latin music spends time on the YouTube charts. So the charts do look very, very different on YouTube.
Speaker 1:Now there's an interesting thought here around music videos. So music videos that were once such an important part of artist promotion and also, you know, of course, fan engagement, are undergoing a shift in relevance. So, in a landscape dominated by short form content, modern videos are often overshadowed by the success of their audio counterparts on platforms like Spotify. Very interesting, so, for instance, in 2023, they say, 36 of the top 40 most streamed Spotify tracks had accompanying videos, but the gap between streams and YouTube views averaged 731 million. So that trend highlights the declining role of music videos as a primary touchpoint for fans.
Speaker 1:All right, so a quick touch on the audio demographics of social media platforms. So just a real quick scan on this. So, tiktok 61% female users. Instagram 56% female users. Youtube 45% female users. Now, the 18 to 24 bracket is bigger on TikTok than it is anywhere else. It's also the biggest kind of area on YouTube too, and Instagram is largely bigger with people between the ages of 25 to 34.
Speaker 1:I'm really skimming through this, by the way. I'm missing out a lot of stuff, but you know, that is interesting. It does tell us something. Ok, and then, finally, in regards to audience locations. So it's no surprise to see that the United States are at number one, brazil are at number two. This is both on TikTok and Instagram, by the way, and YouTube. On TikTok, mexico is number three, followed by United Kingdom in fourth. Instagram, india is third, followed by Indonesia in fourth, the UK sitting sixth on Instagram and on YouTube, india again in third, much like Instagram, with Mexico in fourth, indonesia in fifth and the UK at number seven.
Speaker 1:Okay, so one of the things that I absolutely love about this particular report is the way that the career stages of artists are actually documented. So, again, 11 million artists that are registered through the chart metric system. So many of those artists experience a shift in their career stage during 2024. So the majority of artists today remain in the undiscovered and developing categories, right? However, what 2024 saw over 2023 was a larger number of artists achieving what they consider to be mainstream status. However, let's put some stats on it. So there were, out of 11 million artists, 2.8000 artists achieved mainstream status, while another 308 artists reached superstar level.
Speaker 1:Now, as useful as it might be to kind of look and it is right to look at the very, very top upper echelon, this is why I study the Hot 100, because if something's successful in America, it's going to influence so many other countries around the world, probably 60 or 70 countries at minimum. Now, it's not the be all and end all, especially if you don't listen to pop music, and I don't listen to pop music every single week, but that does tell us something about global influence. But one of the things that I love is looking at the kind of the artists that sit under the radar, of those kind of, you know, the legendary artists or you know the superstar artists, or the mainstream artists, etc. I like to look at some of the other levels as well. So, out of those 11 million, so 818,000, that's the number of undiscovered artists that started to appear in the year of 2024. That's under the tracking system that Chartmetric use, which is very rigorous. So the majority artists enter chartmetric as undiscovered as they are, you know, new to the music scene with, you know, only a few available metrics right for tracking across platforms.
Speaker 1:There is an increase of 61.5k in the developing artist bracket and that's a number that's much higher than 2023. So developing artists are slightly more connected than those in the undiscovered category. Many in that tier have kind of, you know, taken the first steps in establishing their presence across dsps, across social platforms, and that's also web presence, you know, for nlLP and web scraping, blog features, live reviews, that kind of thing all contribute. And then also an 8.5k increase in mid-level artists. That's the proportion of artists reaching the mid-level tier, and that's significantly lower than the two previous levels that we've just looked at there. So for an artist to be considered mid-level, they must show significant consistency in audience and engagement growth A sometimes difficult feat right Now.
Speaker 1:I would love to know a little bit more about how those stats are pulled, but I should imagine that what they're looking at there is a graph analysis of continued growth. Now, of course, we know that in the streaming world, that's truly only fed through continuous releases. So it might be that markers like that come up and come back down again, dependent upon the seasonality of the artist, how often they're releasing music. But of course, we know as well that the artists that go through periods of time where they're not releasing as much music, of time where they're not releasing as much music, those ones that aren't doing that but keep up with their social media on a kind of brand marketing level rather than a kind of campaign marketing approach, when they only post when they release music. You know, the brand marketing approach is much more effective because it keeps engagement up, which I would guess triggers this algorithm. Anyway, a few little snapshots there, a few little highlights. I hope it's been useful in some way or another. I will catch you again next time. May the force be with you.
