Recently it was announced that Rap has dethroned Rock music as the most consumed music genre. Nielson (the iconic TV measurement company) provided a mid-year measurement report showing that the hiphop/R&B genre accounted for 25.1% of all music consumption in the country for the first 6 months of 2017. The complete report can be found here.
Now, rock music still comes in at 23% of all consumption (which is still impressive), but it’s not like there’s a massive shift in the world of music. While there is still another 6 months to go in the year, it remains to be seen if this holds for all of 2017.
So where does electronic music fit into the consumption picture? According to Nielson’s research report, Electronic/Dance music sits in the bottom half of consumption at a lowly 4%. We can’t say we’re really surprised here, but we had certainly thought the genre would have been ahead of Latin music (5.7%). Something else to consider here as well is the amount of influence that electronic/dance music has had on the top three genres. Hip-Hop/Rock/Pop all have sound elements coming from the biggest producers in the electronic space, which is really blurring the lines between genres. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes in the next 6 months — particularly if any major singles drop – but we aren’t holding our breath for any large movements.
Ending this with some food for thought: This whole “first time rap overtook rock” thing should be taken with a grain of salt. It’s measured by Nielsen which can be a bit archaic (some measurements still consist of asking people to write down things they heard on the radio), and it’s only as of 1991 when they started measurement – so it kind of ignores the birth of the rap/hiphop genre. Regardless, this is still an impressive point in time, but we wanted to pose the question of “is this really the first time, or the first time since the movement started?”
Discuss.