Follow us down to the trigger cities of Southeast Asia where their Shazam, Spotify, and YouTube charts have some big implications for tour strategy and catalog exploitation.
Mission
Good morning, it’s Rutger 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, June 27th, 2019.
Trigger Cities in Southeast Asia
On our blog this week, Jason did an epic analysis of Southeast Asia’s trigger cities, revealing what implications their Shazam, Spotify, and YouTube charts have for tour strategy and catalog exploitation.
We’re just scratching the surface of it here.
First, Shazam. From Singapore’s 41 pop genre tags to Jakarta’s 40 to Kuala Lumpur’s 37 down to Bangkok’s 30, an overwhelming Southeast Asian love of pop music in the past month would be an understatement.
However, the region doesn’t appear to care much about querying hip-hop or rap, as the genre only makes a 10th place appearance in Jakarta.
On Spotify, K-pop group BLACKPINK is currently the hottest act throughout the region, having 2.11M monthly listeners in the past month.
Our good friend Lauv (remember him from our June 3 episode?) slides into #2 with 2.10M monthly listeners.
With the exception of BLACKPINK, all other artists have US or UK origins.
Given Spotify’s northern European origins and that its most popular artists are also of Western origin, this makes sense.
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, however, seems to exist in its own silo.
More commonly known as Saigon, locals prefer Korean acts, sharing a love of K-pop boy band SEVENTEEN with Bangkok.
But the city’s #1 most listened-to artist on Spotify is their “queen of V-pop,” Mỹ Tâm.
An outlier here, however, is Ho Chi Minh City’s third most listened to artist on Spotify: Nashville’s Landon Austin.
Austin’s covers are apparently catnip for Southeast Asia’s love of non-controversial pop, because his top five cities by Spotify monthly listeners are all in Southeast Asia.
Should Austin be touring the region like a madman, then?
Based on the available data, it sure looks like it, but we can’t rule out the possibility of bots and bought streams — for which a lot more research still has to be done.
On YouTube, BLACKPINK and BTS, two of Korea’s biggest international acts, consistently appear in the top 10 artists by YouTube daily video views.
Aggregating the top 10 artists of each of the six Southeast Asian cities for YouTube daily views, the #6 most viewed artist is Brad Kane.
If you missed our May 16 podcast episode on Quezon City, Kane was the titular character’s original singing voice for the 1992 Disney animated film Aladdin, which has just been re-released as a live action film starring Will Smith.
The fact that the New York City actor, singer, and producer’s rendition of “A Whole New World” has stirred up so much engagement 27 years later in Southeast Asia says something about how locals consume music … not necessarily to support the artist, but for their own karaoke endeavors!
So, if you’re looking to exploit catalog records, this might be the perfect spot.
But don’t count out domestic artists.
Three Southeast Asian artists make the region’s top 10 most viewed: Bangkok trap rapper YOUNGOHM (at #4 with 1.1M daily views), Indonesian singer Nella Kharisma (at #7 with 637K daily views), and Bangkok punk rock band Labanoon (at #9 with 589K daily views).
One distinct takeaway with these domestic artists is that their YouTube support comes exclusively from their home countries.
Since all three are proudly delivering content in their mother tongues, they are likely limiting their global market appeal, but it’s also why they resonate so well with their fellow country people.
As Jason puts it, looking at a certain market’s music data raises our awareness about who the fans are, what their specific cultural histories have been, and how they are now living as a reflection of it.
Well said, but something to consider beyond the computer screen is the fact that digital behavior doesn’t always correspond directly to behavior in the real world.
Which is why, before you completely tailor your tour or marketing strategy to your streaming data, make sure you’ve considered all avenues of information.
Spotify numbers don’t always translate to ticket sales.
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Thursday, June 27th, 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.
If you want to read Jason’s piece in full and look at some pretty charts, it’s up on our blog at blog.chartmetric.io.