Grab your passports, it’s Excursion Thursday, and we’re headed to Mumbai, India’s largest city and Spotify’s largest potential market.
Mission
Good morning, it’s Jason here at Chartmetric with your 3-minute Data Dump where we upload charts, artists, and playlists into your brain so you can stay up on the latest in the music data world.
Date
This is your Data Dump for Thursday, May 23rd, 2019.
Excursion Thursday: Mumbai
On today’s Excursion Thursday, we’re taking off to India’s most populated city, Mumbai, which has quickly become a testing ground for Spotify’s global expansion strategy.
Mumbai is not only the wealthiest city in India, but it’s also arguably the financial, arts, and entertainment capital of the entire country with an estimated 22.5 million Mumbaikars more than doubling the population of New York City!
So, based on the city’s listening profile….how’s it going? Unfortunately, it’s too early to tap into Spotify’s local monthly listeners, but we can at least look at other Western platforms that are operating there.
Mumbai’s Shazam and YouTube charts definitely reflect the battle between domestic and foreign repertoire preferences.
According to the Top 90 tracks by Shazam Chart Occurrences in the past month, a total of 22 bear Indian ISRC codes. That’s around 25% of total Shazam’d tracks we captured, while there are 38 US-based ISRCs present, about 40%.
Moving to Shazam’s most charted artists in Mumbai over the last 30 days, American rappers Swae Lee and Lil Nas X come in 1st and 3rd with 52 and 47 chart appearances, respectively, and Puerto Rican singer Farruko in 2nd with 50. Fourth and 5th place go to film music composers Vishal-Shekhar and star singer Arijit Singh with 42 and 41 chart appearances each.
Using Top Tracks by YouTube Views, we see a mixed bag at the top, with T. Swift and Brendon Urie’s “Me!” at 235K average daily views and Katy Perry and Migos’ “Bon Appétit” at 77K daily views in 1st and 3rd place respectively. Second place goes to “Aankh Mare” from Bollywood movie Simmba sitting pretty at 188K views.
Genre-wise on the Shazam charts in the past month, it’s still a battle between local and foreign fare: with Hip-Hop at 11 genre tags from mostly American artists, Dance at 15 genre tags from an international artist roster, and Pop at 22 genre tags from both Western and Indian artists.
Twelve of Pop genre tags are from domestic artists, suggesting there’s a slight skew in the past month toward the local when it comes to the genre.
While Spotify competes with the entrenched Indian streaming service JioSaavn, partly headquartered in Mumbai and specializing in Bollywood music , Mumbai’s demand for both Indian and Western music will prove to either be Spotify’s ace in the hole or rock in its shoe.
Outro
That’s a wrap for your Daily Data Dump for Thursday, May 23nd, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.
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Hope you’re not too jet-lagged from today’s Excursion Thursday, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!