It’s time to hit the road again, so we’re heading down south to trigger city São Paulo, Brazil. What makes it such an important global music marketplace?
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 13th, 2019.
Excursion Thursday: Trigger City São Paulo, Brazil
We’re hitting the road again, heading down south to trigger city São Paulo, Brazil, to see what makes it such an important global music marketplace.
First, it’s important to note that São Paulo is also a state in Brazil — naturally, the state in which São Paulo, the city, is located.
Obviously, this presents some major metadata problems, which are compounded by the fact that São Paulo (with a tilde) and “Sao Paulo” (without a tilde) are reported as different cities.
Adjusting for metadata errors, the city, which is Brazil’s wealthiest and most populous, is ranked third in the world for non-unique monthly Spotify listeners, based on our calculations from a week in May.
For that same week, São Paulo came in ninth for global YouTube views.
They’re really living up to their city motto, “I am not led; I lead.”
It’s not just local artists and the longstanding sertanejo style updated for younger people skyrocketing São Paulo with regional streams.
Scanning our top artists charts, the city comes up on three of the Top 10 artists — namely, J Balvin, Justin Bieber, and Shawn Mendes — as somewhere people listen most.
Of the Top 100 artists globally according to our Cross-Platform Performance metric, São Paulo is in the Top 5 listener cities for 26, or just a bit more than a quarter, of them.
Zooming in a bit and looking at Top Artists by Spotify Monthly Listeners on São Paulo’s city page, Brazilian artists do tend to dominate, with the 10 most listened-to artists, except for Lady Gaga, calling Brazil home.
On Top Artists by YouTube Views, the Top 10 are all Brazilian as well, but when it comes to Top Artists by Shazam Chart Occurrences, only two Brazilians make the Top 10, suggesting São Paulo locals are loyal to their countrymen and countrywomen on major streaming platforms, but Shazam is where they learn what’s happening in the Anglo music world.
And they certainly have an ear for British and American hits like “Giant” by Calvin Harris and Rag ‘n’ Bone Man or “Happier” by Marshmello and Bastille.
With a population comparable to New York City and Los Angeles combined, São Paulo tops each of those cities on the global stage, thanks to a musical ecosystem — not to mention tradition — as robust as the Amazon rainforest and an appetite for pop hits from their neighbors on the northern side of the Tropic of Cancer.
Outro
That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Thursday, June 13th, 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.
If you’re interested in learning more about trigger cities, check out Jason’s in-depth analysis on our blog at blog.chartmetric.io.