Jul 25 2019 4 mins
- Highlights
- What’s in a name? For the subgenre game on Spotify, Apple, Deezer, and Amazon’s top playlists … a lot.
- 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.
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- Date
- This is your Data Dump for Friday, July 26th, 2019.
- Odd Subgenres Gaining Ground on Streaming’s Top Playlists
- Ever heard of Brostep, Lilith, Etherpop, Crunk, Redneck, Metropopolis, or Pagode?
- No? Well, chances are, you’ve listened to examples of some of these subgenres, because they now comprise a small but significant portion of the top playlists on Spotify, Apple, Deezer, and Amazon.
- Thanks to the new subgenre feature on our Artists tab, where we've categorized the more than 7,000 Spotify genre tags into a handful of parent genres, finding artists that fit these niche descriptors is easy.
- Just select the main genre and then scroll through the subgenres to filter to your heart’s content.
- If we apply this taxonomy to Spotify’s Hot Country playlist, which boasts around 5.5M followers, Redneck and Brostep account for 5.7 and 2.9 percent of that playlist’s track distribution when it comes to genre market share.
- What exactly do those subgenres sound like? Well, let’s just say that Redneck is REALLY country and Brostep is in-your-face Dubstep.
- On Get Turnt, which also has around 5.5M followers, Crunk has 1.6 percent of the playlist’s genre makeup.
- The Subgenre is also featured on Apple Music’s Rap Life, #OnRepeat, It’s Lit!!!, and Gymflow playlists, and on Amazon’s Rap Rotation playlist, finding its low at 0.8 percent and its high at 2.9 percent.
- Crunk actually emerged as a subgenre of Hip-Hop during the ‘90s in the American South.
- Crank it up.
- Deezer’s Brand New UK and Neue Hits playlists, meanwhile, feature something called Metropopolis, which is apparently a neologism of Spotify’s and includes artists like Charli XCX, Bleachers, and St. Vincent.
- That portmanteau — think urban pop — sits at 5.6 percent on Brand New UK (tied with House) and at 5.1 percent on Neue Hits (tied with Rap).
- Apple’s The A-List: Pop playlist and Amazon’s Pop Hits playlist share a subgenre called Etherpop, which sounds pretty self-explanatory as a combination of ethereal and pop.
- It wins out on Amazon, where it has 2.9 percent share of the playlist (tied with Emo and R&B) vs. 1.2 on Apple, where it’s tied with Rap, House, K-Pop, and yup, Metropopolis.
- And that brings us to two subgenres exclusive to Deezer and Amazon’s top playlists, respectively.
- On Deezer, the Pagode subgenre is seeing success on its Top Brazil and Explosão Brasil playlists, which makes total sense, considering it’s a form of Samba.
- Brazilians love it, too, as it dominates Explosão Brasil with a 20.8 percent share and comes in third on Top Brazil with 13.3 percent.
- Lilith, which claims 2.1 percent on Amazon’s Fresh Country and 5.8 percent on Amazon’s I Miss the ‘90s, seems to also be a geo-specific subgenre, with its roots in the Canadian-American traveling music festival, Lilith Fair, which featured an inspiring number of female-fronted folk and rock acts in the ‘90s.
- If you’re curious about what artists might fall into each of these subgenres — Brostep to Lilith, Etherpop to Crunk, Redneck to Metropopolis, or Pagode to … C86? — you’re in luck with our subgenre filter. Nerd out for free with a Chartmetric account!
Outro
- That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday, July 26th, 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.
- Free accounts are at chartmetric.com
- And article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com
- Happy Friday, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you next week!