What Spotify data show about the decline of English

 Bad bunny may not be a household name in the English-speaking world. Yet the Puerto Rican rapper, whose verses are usually in Spanish (and, on one occasion, Japanese), was the most played artist in 2020 and 2021 for listeners on Spotify, the world’s largest music-streaming platform. Such success might have been harder to achieve 30 years ago when English was dominant. In the new digital era, it is becoming ever more common.

To investigate the evolution of music tastes across the world, The Economist trawled through the top 100 tracks in 70 countries according to Spotify. Examining 13,000 hits in 70 languages along with other data like genre, lyrical language and nationality of artist, we sought to group countries according to musical similarity.

On these 320,000 records, we employed a principal-components analysis to assess the degree of musical kinship between countries, and then a clustering algorithm (known as k-means) to group them. Three broad clusters emerged: a contingent in which English is dominant; a Spanish-language ecosystem; and a third group that mostly enjoys local songs in various tongues. Across all, one trend emerged: the hegemony of English is in decline.

The drop over the past five years is mostly concentrated outside the English sphere. Within the Spanish cluster, English quickly lost ground—from 25% of hits to 14%—as native artists like Bad Bunny and Rauw Alejandro became internationally ascendant. Among the local-language cluster, in countries with strong, indigenous music cultures—like Brazil, France and Japan—English declined even more precipitously, dropping from 52% of hit songs to just 30%. Only in the English cluster did the language remain unfazed, dropping only slightly from 92% to 90%.

There is no doubt that, despite its decline, English is still king. Of the 50 most-streamed tracks on Spotify over the past five years, 47 were in English. And the genres it incubated are being widely adopted elsewhere. There is now excellent rap available in Arabic, Russian and, of course, Spanish. A sign of the momentum in global-music tastes comes from a collaboration in 2018 between two superstars—Bad Bunny and Drake, the self-proclaimed king of rap in English. On that occasion, Drake delivered the chorus in Spanish.

Songs jump musical cultures more often than before. Modern drivers like social media are to blame. To demonstrate this, we plotted the most-streamed song for countries in each group weekly for the full five-year period, revealing precisely when and where these leaps happen.

Luis Fonsi (featuring Daddy Yankee) | “Despacito”

Crossovers can be engineered. “Despacito”, a huge hit in the Spanish-language ecosystem for Luis Fonsi featuring Daddy Yankee in the early months of 2017, ascended to the top spot in 36 countries elsewhere thanks to a remix featuring Justin Bieber, the Canadian pop sensation.

Mariah Carey | “All I Want for Christmas is You”

Christmas is big business in the streaming charts. For that reason, Mariah Carey returns to the most-streamed lists seasonally on the strength of her modern-day Christmas classic. She takes the top spot in 24 countries in the English-language group, and manages to make incursions into the local-language group, for example in Germany.

BTS (featuring Halsey) | “Boy With Luv”

Many of the K-pop bands popular in South Korea manage to achieve global success by mixing in some English. Some simply mix in English words amid their Korean crooning. Others choose an English title. And some do entire songs in English. None has managed the transition as deftly as the boy band BTS, epitomised by their international hit “Boy With Luv” done with the American songwriter Halsey.

We have designed an interactive matrix showcasing the most-streamed song on Spotify in 70 countries every week from December 2016 to the first week of 2022. These range from global blockbuster hits like Ed Sheeran’s exceedingly saccharine and exceedingly catchy “Shape of You” to niche sensations in Japan and Iceland. Hover to reveal the song and its language, and see how far its popularity spread. Click to listen to snippets of every song and explore musical tastes around the world—from Polish rap to Brazilian pop.

Note: We labelled each of the roughly 1,700 songs with the lyrics language using an automated technique. While the reliability of this method is good, occasional errors may have crept in. Each song is only labelled with one language. Where a song contains two or more languages, our automated method makes a best guess. Spotify is not available in every country and launched in some countries only midway through the time period analysed, which is why there are initially no data for some countries.

Audio and album images courtesy of Spotify.

Sources: Spotify; Genius; Google Translate; Musixmatch; Popnable; Soundcharts; The Economist

What Spotify data show about the decline of English | The Economist