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When listening to the playlists of a regular radio station or going by what he can see and hear in all kinds of communication media on any country, someone with little knowledge of the music market might conclude that most of the music consumed is written in the English language, and usually interpreted by artists from the United States or Great Britain.
This could not however be further from the truth: all the sales data and studies point to the fact that all countries of the world consume a massive amount of music produced by local artists. Graph 12 shows what percentage of sales were made by local artists in certain countries.
Graph 12. PERCENTAGE OF ALBUMS IN THE YEARLY TOP 10 OF 2012 WHICH WERE MADE BY LOCAL ARTISTS. IFPI Digital Music Report 2013 (PDF).
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But do we listen to the same songs that we like to sing? Do we only sing in our own language, or do we dare to try our hand on other languages? What are the most popular singing languages in each country? Can we learn something about the degree of bilingualism in a country by looking at what their residents are singing
It is obvious that we can enjoy listening to songs in a language that we don’t speak, as proven by global hits such as “Gangnam Style” (Korean) or the earlier “Macarena” (Spanish), but this does not mean that we can, want to, or know how to sing them. In fact, the data shows that the popularity of such songs in karaoke singing is low. It is one thing to hum a song, and a very different one to dare interpret it.
The analysis of usage data from Red Karaoke collected in 2015 (graph 13) allows us to confirm the preference for consuming music of your own language, which, as is to be expected, is even more pronounced in the case of karaoke singing due to the lack of knowledge of foreign languages. In the case of Spain for example, 85% of songs sang in karaoke are in Spanish, compared to the 80% in listened music quoted in the IFPI report. Only Mexico has an even higher share of local songs sang in karaoke than Spain, at 87.4%.
Among the countries analyzed in this study, Mexico and Spain are the least bilingual countries of all, or at least the ones that least often dare to sing a song in a foreign languages, followed by Japan, where 83.70% of karaoke songs are in Japanese. In turn, countries such as the United States, Vietnam, Brazil and Indonesia all hover at about a 70% share of karaoke songs in their respective official languages, which shows that there are large segments of the population able to sing in other languages.
These numbers are collected in graph 13, which also shows an extreme bilingualism in France and Germany, given that these countries sing more in English than in their own languages; in this case, the effect might have been amplified by the fact that the catalogue of karaoke songs available in French and German in Red Karaoke, while important, is not quite as large or up-to-date with the most recent hits as the rest of the countries. In any case, the IFPI report already featured Germany and France as the countries with the lowest consumption of local music, which confirms the trend visible in graph 13.
Graph 13. Share of karaoke songs sung in the local language by country. Red Karaoke 2015.
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* France and Germany have a karaoke song catalogue that is somewhat less extensive and up-to-date than that in the other countries.
From our detailed analysis of the Red Karaoke data we can uncover another interesting conclusion on the importance of different languages in each country. That is to say, apart from the official language, what other languages are sung in each country, and how often?
In this case, English and Spanish stand head and shoulders over the other most popular second languages in karaoke, which not only indicates the solid health of these two languages, but also their influence on popular music in our day. They are the only languages with a significant presence in all 9 countries analyzed, although naturally, the importance of English is far greater than that of Spanish still.
Spanish reaches a 24.6% share of use in the United States, no doubt due to the strong increase in the Spanish-speaking population over the past few years in that country. Other countries of note are France, where Spanish reaches a 6.7% share, as well as Brazil and Germany with 4.8% and 4.4% respectively, and a surprising 2% in Vietnam.
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Soon we will post more data from the Global Karaoke Study 2015.