Which country has the most unique taste in music? Let’s ask statistics!
Stat Significant is a pretty cool Substack that often offers some strange and wonderful perspectives on music. One of their latest missives has to do with the national tastes of different countries around the world.
The article opens with a mostly correct rundown of CanCon (they get the “P” in the MAPL system definition slightly wrong) and then dives into defining four types of music cultures.
- Music Exporters
- Music Importers
- Self-sustaining Music Cultures
- Balanced Music Scenes
From there, they get deep into their methodology (let’s gloss over that) and then put up a couple of interesting charts. This one, for example, shows where the most-streamed acts come from.
No surprises there. The US is the biggest music market on the planet and with 330 million, you’d expect American artists to suck up most of the streaming bandwidth. The US is a big music exporter. I’m suprirsed that Canada (Bieber, Shawn Mendes, Drake, The Weeknd, et al) isn’t here.
Now look at this chart. What kind of overlap is there between what’s being streamed on the Global Top 50 Spotify chart and the country’s local Top 50 Spotify chart? Canada is more-or-less in line with the rest of the planet.
The thinking is that the less overlap with the Global Top 50, the greater the strength of the local music scenes. The most unique in the world? Türkiye.
