The celebrations of hip-hop’s 50th anniversary continue, including a stat from Spotify that summarises the genre’s status in the streaming age.
“In 2023, nearly a quarter of all streams on Spotify globally are hip-hop music,” announced the DSP in a blog post. It added that more than 400 million people have streamed hip-hop music on its service this year.
That’s just under 73% of Spotify’s 551 million monthly active users, although those listeners span the full gamut from the keenest hip-hop fans to people who’ve just heard some hip-hop tracks when streaming Spotify’s biggest playlists.
Hip-hop’s share of Spotify streams doesn’t come as a huge surprise. In its midyear report earlier this year, Luminate revealed that in the US, R&B and hip-hop combined accounted for 27.3% of total on-demand streams.
However, Spotify’s figure is global, and to emphasise that point, its blog post noted that after the US, the biggest markets for hip-hop streams on its service are Mexico, Brazil, Germany, France, the UK, Spain, India, Canada and Italy.
Spotify’s creative director and head of urban music, Carl Chery, pointed to British artist Central Cee’s recent breakthrough in the US as emblematic of the trend. “We’re now in a space where culture can originate in Toronto, London, Paris, or Nigeria and make its way to the US.”
Amid all this, the 50th birthday celebrations continue. Yesterday Universal Music Group announced its plans to mark the anniversary. It’s starting by lighting New York’s Empire State Building up in gold, as well as launching a Hip-Hop At 50 website with playlists, merch, a map of upcoming events and more.
Meanwhile, Roc Nation has launched a ‘Humble Soles‘ mixtape as part of its wider relationship with Puma, and Tommy Boy Music is releasing a 50-track compilation album drawn from its own catalogue, which will also be raising donations for New York’s Universal Hip Hop Museum.
And, as we covered the other day, YouTube has launched its own hip-hop hub called Fifty Deep to mark this year’s anniversary, announcing that in 2022 nine of its top 10 artists in the US were hip-hop artists, generating more than 16bn views between them.
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