R+P Post 6: Current Trends in Popular Music

The digital music economy has grown massively over the last few years due to the increased use of streaming services such as YouTube, Spotify and iTunes. According to a report by UK Music, these  services have increased in value from £168 million in 2014 to £251 million in 2015. Additionally the report contains a graph showing the percentage of people aged 15+ years old who are using different platforms to listen to music.

This graph shows that in 2016, YouTube was a bigger platform than physical CDs, proving just how relevant digital music consumption is. Most of the platforms are digital and I expect that the number streaming services will increase in the future. 

Below is the Live iTunes chart on Sunday 15th October 2017. I have added annotations to show the genre of each of the songs in the top 10 to see if there is a trend. 

By finding out the genres of each of the songs, I noticed that most of the tracks are in the Pop genre. The top 2 songs are both in the Latin genre, a genre that has become more popular in recent months due to the massive success of the song Despacito by Luis Fonsi ft. Daddy Yankee. Justin Beiber's remix helped the song to reach number one on the US Billboard Hot 100, a first for a primarily Spanish song since 1996. Since this, many more remixes of Spanish songs or partially Spanish songs have featured in the charts. 

From this research I have learnt that online services and digital media are an important part of music marketing and distribution. Additionally, from looking at current genre trends, there are many options we can look at for our project. For instance we could look at doing a pop or hip hop song as they are featured in the charts and therefore there is an audience for these genres. Alternatively we could look at other genres such as contemporary R&B or Rock as there is a gap in the market for these genres.