Answering the question of what is the most popular music genre is not an easy task. It may seem a priori that the pop and rock genres could be the winners, but there are many studies that reach very different conclusions, depending on the timeframe of their analysis, their methodology, and what data they study (sales, streams, video views, radio impressions, fan loyalty, tweets…).
We have seen studies where the winners were such surprising genres as Hip Hop or Country, or even Heavy Metal. We believe however that more serious studies, such as this one by Nielsen Music, might come closer to reality, at least as long as we are talking about the United States.
Graph 14. Music consumption by genre in the United States.
We have already seen however that what people listen to and what they sing does not necessarily coincide. In fact, the results of the analysis of Red Karaoke usage data during 2015 offer a very different picture: it turns out that the most-sung genres around the whole world are ballads (love songs) and pop songs: practically equally popular, they each have a 17% share, followed by Latin music at 11% and Oldies with almost 6%.
It becomes clear that karaoke fans around the world prefers slow songs and love songs. “Faster” genres such as dance or hip hop, which are very popular when measured by sales numbers, radio impressions or streaming do not appear in the top 5 in any of the countries analyzed, and the ever-popular rock is relegated to fifth place in the global rankings with a share slightly over 5%.
Graph 15. Percentage of karaoke plays by genre and country. Red Karaoke 2015.
The country-level analysis shows that this is a global trend, with few differences save for the different shades of local pop popular in each of the countries (Spanish pop, Brazilian, Japanese and Chinese pop occupy prime positions in their corresponding countries). The only trend of note is the strength of Latin music in the United States, which reinforces the previous analysis on the use of different languages in that market.
Soon we will post more data from the Global Karaoke Study 2015.