It’s Excursion Thursday and we’ll be exploring the music tastes of not London, not New York, not LA….but Quezon City. Don’t know where that is? Well, pack your bags.
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 16th 2019.
Excursion Thursday: Quezon City
We’re trying out a new segment called Excursion Thursday where we explore the music profile of a city or region and see what’s good.
And for kicks, let’s start out with a city you may frequently see in your own streaming platform data but may not be that familiar with: Quezon City in the Philippines.
If you’re not familiar with the Philippines, it’s a country in SE Asia. South of Taiwan, east of Vietnam, and north of Indonesia.
It’s really thousands of islands that also feature two official languages: Tagalog and English. This is obviously important for the Western music market and definitely a factor in why the Philippines can play a huge part in how English language artists fare in the region.
For example, American singer Khalid currently has the most Spotify monthly listeners on the entire Swedish platform at 49.6M.
While his most popular Spotify cities are LA and London at 1M monthly listeners, and Chicago, Dallas and NYC between 800K to 1M...Quezon City silently pulls up in the #6 spot with a whopping 769K monthly listeners. Not bad for a city you might have not known about.
Examples in other genres include rapper Travis Scott pulling 202K local monthly listeners and English pop rockers the 1975 featuring 126K themselves.
Now, Quezon City sits adjacent to Manila, the country’s capital, and loosely speaking, is what Orange County is to Los Angeles, or what Brooklyn is to Manhattan: a bigger, heavily populated extension of its more popular sister city.
Besides the language connection, part of what is likely driving such strong streaming activity specific to Quezon City is the fact that two of the country’s most popular universities- the University of the Philippines Diliman and Ateneo de Manila- are also located here.
Some of the top artists by YouTube video daily views show more of a regional focus: K-pop supergroup BLACKPINK currently has 496K local daily views, BTS 215K and Korea/Japan-focused girl group TWICE at 136K.
However Western artists still stand toe to toe, with Taylor Swift at 253K local daily views, Post Malone coming in at 127K and Brad Kane at 241K.
Wait what? Who’s Brad Kane, you say? Well, if you were around for the original Disney animated movie Aladdin in 1992, he was the original singing voice for main character on the soundtrack.
And how does this make sense in Quezon City? Well, if you don’t have any Filipino friends, suffice it to say that karaoke is a national pastime, and well, practicing the Disney hits are probably a part of what’s going on here.
Now when it comes to Instagram, this is a whole other world. While in the States, Instagram is the natural social media backdrop to the music industry, Western artists just aren’t that popular for Quezon City citizens.
As a matter of fact, the first Western music artist that shows up on our top followed IG artists is Hailee Steinfeld in 58th place at 62K. And before her are a legion of Filipino artists who, like Steinfeld, either bounce between the worlds of music/TV/film or make OPM.
Now if you don’t know what OPM is, that stands for Original Pilipino Music, which stands next to the country’s love for Western music, as a matter of pride in their domestic artistry.
It’s so popular that Spotify made an OPM hub that Music Ally wrote about back in February. The star playlist is called Tatak Pinoy, featuring OPM music and over 1M followers to date...check it out!
So next time you see Quezon City in your streaming data, hopefully this will put some context to it...and while you’re at it, might as well license your tunes to Filipino karaoke bars posthaste!
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Thursday May 16th 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.