January 2024 ➡️ *blinks* ➡️ September 2024

I’ll admit, I haven’t been keeping a close eye on the Spotify charts lately. It’s not like I’ve been slacking off—just caught up analyzing other stuff. So, I figured it’s about time for a quick refresher on where the Dutch Spotify Top 200 stands. And hey, why not share what I found with you too?

There’s been a lot of buzz online about the IFPI report and the whole (g)localisation trend. To be honest, it’s not exactly a new concept. What surprised me was how the IFPI, which is supposed to represent the global recording industry, based their conclusions about the dominance of local music on just the top 10 charting songs. You’d think they’d dig a bit deeper and analyze a bigger pool. After all, the long tail matters a lot in the bigger picture.

As much as I’d love to dive into the full landscape of Dutch music streaming, it’s just me flying solo here, so I’ve got to work with what’s available online. That means scraping the daily Spotify Top 200 to spot any trends for 2024. Hey, at least it's better than just looking at a top 10. ;-)

As usual, I tend to focus on a specific region or country, but feel free to try this out for any market you’re interested in!

Shining a Spotlight on Dutch Music’s Presence in the Charts

I was pretty surprised to see a shift in the first half of 2024 compared to the last five years. As you can see it takes 6 months to catch up with the monthly average from 2023.

I've also broken it down by week to spot any significant spikes or drops in the share of Dutch music.

I’d love to dig into a bigger dataset, but even within the top 200, you can clearly see a difference between the top 50, 51-100, 101-150, and 151-200. It just proves my earlier point... a top 10 simply doesn’t cut it.

I also wanted to check if there’s any difference in the age of the songs during those first six months, and the visualization below makes it pretty clear.

During the first five months, the share of songs older than three years was higher than in the previous five years.

Here are a few key takeaways:

• Shift in Dutch music trends: The first half of 2024 showed a notable change compared to the last five years, with Dutch music taking six months to catch up with the 2023 monthly average.

• Age of songs matters: The share of older songs (3+ years) increased in the first five months of 2024, bucking the trend of recent years.

• Top 200 reveals more: Even within the Top 200, there’s a clear distinction between different segments (Top 50, 51-100, etc.), further emphasizing that just looking at a Top 10 isn’t enough to understand the bigger picture.

What’s your theory on why these changes are happening?

Since we're working with genres and metadata, it's not going to be 100% foolproof, but we get pretty close. We're checking if a song is tagged with a Dutch genre, and if there's no genre metadata, we look at whether the ISRC starts with the country's ISO code, followed by a label check.