By Ivan Sanchez
Spotify, a popular music streaming service, has recently unveiled “Spotify Wrapped 2023.”
This list documents the top genres, songs, and artists streamed by people all over the world over the last year.
This year’s top streamed artist globally is Taylor Swift with the list also including eight Black and Latino artists including Bad Bunny, The Weeknd, Drake, Peso Pluma, Feid, Travis Scott, SZA, KAROL G, and Lana Del Rey. Mega-hits like “Ella Baila Sola” by Estabon Armado and Peso Pluma and “Kill Bill” by SZA powered minority artists to the top of the Spotify charts this year, while last year Bad Bunny held court as the most streamed artist in the world.
According to Spotify, “Afrobeats is one of the fastest-growing genres…growing by 550 percent since 2017 with new audiences emerging in Mexico and India. In 2023, Rema’s ‘Calm Down’ became the first Afrobeats artist-led track to hit a billion streams on Spotify.”
Despite the popularity of Black and Latino artists globally and in the United States, American award shows like the Grammys have continued to hand their statues disproportionally to white artists. According to a study from Dr. Stacy L. Smith and the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, 38 percent of artists on Billboard’s charts from 2012 to 2020 were Black while only 26.7 percent of Grammy nominees in the same period were Black. Even fewer of those nominees went on to win a statue in one of the Grammy “top four” awards with most recognition for Black and Latino coming from genre categories.
While Spotify continues to reflect the masses, the Music Industry and its pre-eminent awards shows must learn to reflect the growing diversity of the American population if they hope to remain relevant in the coming years.
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