Follow the Trends in 18 Different Genres

Urska Jaksa

Feb 11, 2021

If you work in the music industry, we don’t have to tell you how important it is to stay on top of trends – whether they refer to music preferences on local markets, shifts in specific genres, new social media and streaming channels that allow artists to reach wider audiences, or more. 

The good thing is that you can now do all that research before your morning coffee gets cold. With Viberate, up-to-date information for 18 different genres is there any time you need it.

❓ WHAT YOU'LL LEARN IN THIS GUIDE: 

You'll learn how to monitor trends in genres and find local markets with high potential using Viberate's Genre analytics. Every music genre, from Electronic to Country, has its own page that brings together data from multiple sources for an in-depth overview.

➡️ Let’s say we work for a Dutch Electronic label. First, we want to check which channels have been the most important for Electronic artists in the last year. Additionally, we’re interested in exploring market opportunities in neighboring countries. We’ll research the genre in one place with just a couple of clicks.

✅ To get to the genre’s analytics page, type “Electronic” in the search box.

Scroll through the results, and click on the genre name. This takes us to the genre’s Viberate Page. There, click on the ANALYTICS tab. We’re using the example of an Electronic label, but the same steps apply to any other genre.

✅ Scroll down to see the Most Popular Electronic Subgenres.

First, you see the Electronic subgenres, sorted by their overall popularity – these are the ones that perform the best on social media and music channels right now.

Here, we want to identify the specific channels where our subgenre currently has the strongest fanbase. Because most of the artists on our label focus on Techno, we’ll check where it ranks using different sorting options.

If we sort the subgenres by YouTube followers, we can see that Techno doesn’t have a strong fanbase on the channel in comparison to other subgenres. 

👉 On Spotify and Instagram, Techno artists rank higher, while SoundCloud is the channel where they have the biggest following.

✅ Next, check which channels have gained in importance for Electronic artists recently.

Skip one section and go to Fanbase Growth Overview. Here, we can identify the strongest music and social media channels for Electronic artists, and see which channels have been growing lately. Knowing which channels to focus our efforts on is especially useful when planning a release, gig, tour or any kind of promotional activity.

Assessing the all-time stats, we can see that Electronic artists have the biggest fanbase on Instagram, followed by YouTube, Spotify and SoundCloud.

Now, we change the time period to see if any of the channels have been growing faster. If we select 12 MONTHS, we can see that last year, Spotify, YouTube and Instagram have risen quicker than other channels. 

👉 This means that Electronic artists have gained the highest number of followers on Spotify, followed by YouTube and Instagram. 

If we look at the 3 MONTHS and 1 MONTH results to double-check, this trend is confirmed.

We can conclude that even though SoundCloud is an important channel for Electronic artists (especially for Techno artists), its growth has slowed down in the recent year. This confirms that focusing efforts on building a strong Spotify presence is a good idea for Electronic artists.

✅ To round it off, examine the Top Countries by Spotify Monthly Listeners.

In this section, we can see the biggest markets for Electronic artists on Spotify. As a label, we can check whether the market we operate in is among the biggest. More importantly, we can find new potential markets for promoting our artists in the future.

👉 In our case, this is what stands out: From the perspective of a Dutch label, we’re happy to see that the country is the fifth market in the world. As we’re also interested in examining the potential of neighboring countries, finding Germany on the list is a good sign. If we look above, it’s second in the world.

This segues nicely into the second part of our market research, examining the potential for Electronic artists on the German market. Check it out here.

➡️ It’s your turn to give it a go!

Go to the search box and try this method on your genre. Different sections can be more important in your case, so don’t be afraid to adapt the process to your needs.