Updated my brain (and script) on the charts, figured I’d pass it on... 📚

Every few months, I like to check in on what’s going on in the Dutch Spotify charts — mostly just to keep myself sharp, since I’m not really deep in that world day-to-day anymore. So I dust off my script, run some fresh data, and revisit a few of the stats I’ve written about in earlier newsletters.

Lately, I’ve been feeling that itch again to dive into some bigger research-y stuff around the music industry. It took me a damn long time to get back into that mindset, so I figured it’d be a good idea to get myself back up to speed on what’s been happening. And while I was at it, I thought I’d quickly share a little update on the Dutch charts with you.

The age of songs on the chart

I’ve updated the graph below with data from the last quarter of 2024 and the first three months of 2025 (March is based on the average so far).

So far in 2025, things are looking pretty similar to early 2024 when it comes to how recent the music on the charts is. Tracks released in the same year are holding steady, while songs from between one and two years ago are up by about 5% compared to the first three months of 2024. Older repertoire (3+ years old) is down around 5% compared to the first quarter in 2024.

If we rewind a bit: when comparing 2024 to 2023, there was a small 2.1% bump in music that was + three years old, and a 1% increase in same-year releases.

Local share of Dutch music on the charts

If you remember from the last update, I called out the IFPI for their conclusions — slight understatement there. Looking only at the top 10 songs and claiming that local music dominates? Yeah, that doesn’t really add up.

Obviously, I’m working with data from just the Top 200, but even within that, you can clearly see differences depending on where you look: the Top 50, spots 51–100, and the bottom half.

That said, the first two months of 2025 (and the start of March, even though it’s not on the graph yet) are showing a higher share of local music on the charts compared to the same period in 2024.

Across the full Top 200, 33.2% of the chart so far in 2025 is made up of local music — that’s a +3.85% jump compared to the same period in 2024.

The biggest growth is seen in the 101–150 segment (+6.7%), followed by 151–200 (+3.7%), then the Top 50 (+2.9%), and a smaller bump in the 51-100 segment (+2.9%).

And just because... why not? 😉
Here’s a weekly breakdown of the local share across the full Top 200.

That’s it for this week — short but (hopefully) sweet.

If you loved it, hated it, or just skimmed for the graphs — drop a vote in the poll below.

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.