Drake took home a bag of Billboard Music Awards, but Ozuna and Lauren Daigle represent for the Latin and CCM fans
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.
FYI - the Chartmetric team will be in Nashville for the Music Biz Conference next week, so if you’re there, please say hello at our Wednesday night panel, but if not, the podcast will be back on Friday May 10th.
Date
This is your Data Dump for Friday May 3rd 2019.
Billboard Music Awards 2019: Ozuna & Lauren Daigle
The 2019 Billboard Music Awards, or BBMAs, happened on Wednesday night, and Drake took home the most awards with 12 and Cardi B showing up in 18 categories with 21 nominations total.
As a US-based company with the finalists determined by their own private award process, it would make sense that Billboard heavily decorated two of the biggest chart-topping artists in the English-speaking West.
But what about winners that are also big in their own right, but just catering to a different segment of the population?
Two of those winners are Puerto Rico’s Ozuna and Louisiana native Lauren Daigle. Ozuna is now one of Latin music’s biggest reggaetón artists and Daigle has risen to become a star in the Contemporary Christian Music genre.
It’s certainly arguable that neither artist should be put into a box, so to say, but the nature of the Billboard Award categories they won in- Top Latin Artist/Album/Song for Ozuna and Top Christian Artist/Album/Song for Daigle- certainly encourage that kind of thinking.
So in the data, it’s interesting to see how these conceptualizations play out, and where it doesn’t seem to matter much.
For example, with Ozuna, his mostly Spanish language content obviously plays towards Latin-American areas: his top five Spotify monthly listener cities are Mexico City, Santiago, Madrid, Buenos Aires and Lima.
With Daigle, hers are Dallas, Paris, Chicago, Atlanta and Los Angeles. A 2015 Gallup poll found that about 75% of the US identify as Christian, so it would make sense that Daigle plays best stateside, but a strong trend in Paris over the last few months is curious.
In the last three months alone, she grew her unique monthly listeners over 400% to 105K, while in the same time period, the other four top cities grew less than 30%.
Evidence of her success in the French-speaking capital is the fact that she was added to Paris-based Deezer Music’s #1 playlist- Les titres du moment with 9.8M fans- on April 6th, almost as a recognition that her popularity was cross-platform and not limited to just Spotify.
For Ozuna, while most of his top YouTube countries are Spanish-speaking (such as Mexico, Argentina and Colombia), his second biggest country is the United States at almost 16% of his Daily Views at 2.8M.
With the 2017 US Census reporting that 13% or almost 40M Americans speak Spanish, it makes sense that even a mostly English-speaking country outranks other Spanish-speaking countries due to sheer population size.
For example, Ozuna’s third biggest YouTube country, Argentina, has a total population of 45M, which is only slightly bigger than the US Spanish-speaking population at almost 40M.
So all of this to say that when targeting an artist’s demographic, it usually pays off to understand their market size and where they are, because some data trends are expected but sometimes, quite unexpected.
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday May 3rd 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.