YouTube has launched charts for 43 countries, but surprisingly India doesn’t figure on the list. This is strange because tracks from India frequently feature in YouTube’s global charts for top songs and top music videos.
According to a report that appeared in FirstPost, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI)’s recently released Global Music Report and India was the 19th largest music market in the world, with revenues of Rs 725 crore in 2017. This figure represented an increase of 27 per cent over the previous year with the bulk of this growth coming from ad-supported, as opposed to subscription-based, streaming. Which means it’s fair to say that plays on YouTube are generating a substantial amount of the money being made from music in India.
A blog post on YouTube’s For Artists section reads: “There are four charts available; Top Songs, Top Artists, Top Music Videos and Trending. We are constantly working to improve our charts experience on YouTube and we plan to add more geos, more charts and additional functionality to Music Insights including song analytics in the future.”
These lists monitor different kinds of viewership. While Top Music Videos shows the most viewed official videos on the platform, the Top Songs survey is wider in scope and includes hits from lyrics videos and user-generated content. Top Artists tallies an act’s popularity on the basis of the number of views garnered by all such videos plus officially released live performances. Trending focuses only on new releases.
Now, let’s look at the 43 countries for which YouTube has launched charts. It includes some usual suspects such as the US, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, South Korea, Canada, Australia and Brazil, which are currently nine of the world’s 10 biggest music markets, according to the IFPI. The video streaming service is banned in China, which is at No. 10.
The other 34 countries comprise a few from Africa (Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe); a large bunch in Europe (Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine), Mexico; New Zealand; and four others from South America (Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru).
The five South American countries along with the Spanish-speaking nations of the US, Mexico and Spain are particularly significant, as artists from those regions make up much of the viewership of YouTube these days. And contributed considerably to making ‘Despacito’ by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee the most viewed video of all time, with over five billion hits.
Sourced from Firstpost.com
