Just how popular is Soca music?
Swedish audio streaming giant, Spotify recently announced that it was expanding its reach by offering its subscription service to 80+ new markets around the world, including the Caribbean: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago.
[Editor’s Update: On September 29, 2021, Spotify announced that it became “available to even more users and creators in the Caribbean, including French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint Barthélemey, Saint Martin, Anguilla, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Montserrat, Turks & Caicos Islands, Aruba, Bonaire, Saint Eustatius, Saba, and Sint Maarten.” This effectively means that Spotify and its services and tools are now available to the Caribbean region as a whole.]
What does Spotify’s official presence mean for the Caribbean music industry? New music discovery by listeners and a global platform for creation and collaboration are potential benefits to expand the reach of our music. Soca, dancehall and all their sub-genres can now be heard in these new Spotify markets by a potential audience of a billion fans. Spotify’s goal, of course, is to convert many of those new listeners from the freemium level to the paid premium subscription level, thus boosting the company’s share price.
It’s not all about altruism that Spotify is venturing into the Caribbean and other regions. It’s about growth and supporting its share price for its investors in the marketplace: “For all of Spotify’s hard work, the realities of running a streaming audio company are unavoidable: Margins are slim and competition is strong . . . For its part, 12-year-old Spotify argues the streaming audio business is still in its early stages and that growth, not profits, should be its focus.”
This announcement and the analysis of the move by Spotify reinforces that the music industry is a volume business. Having hits is the goal of artists nowadays. Millions and billions of streams and views, likes and follows are the desired counts for artists to make a living. But what is our reality here, and what do we have to do to get that global significance, such as how a name like Marley is iconic, or a song like “Despacito” is universally popular? Some genres are big, some are not, and examples of both exist right here in the Caribbean. And let’s be honest, despite the efforts of many for five decades, soca music is not that big. Yet.
I have been doing some data collection and collation to get a better understanding of where we are, and how others see us and deal with us in the marketplace. Prior to Spotify’s official entrance in the Caribbean, YouTube was the platform used by many to discover music. YouTube has long been the largest music streaming service on the planet with 2 billion music users on the platform at the end of 2020. The service provides data which can be used as a gauge of global popularity of the genres and their stars. The stark difference between soca, dancehall and reggaeton is the difference between millions and billions. It’s always better to see it to understand the gulf between a popular tune in Trinidad and a global hit.
Soca music is now Caribbean music with artists from St. Vincent, Barbados, Jamaica and Bahamas being highly popular. It is also still closely allied with Carnivals, with a number of releases mainly focused on the Trinidad Carnival cycle, effectively from late November to February of the following year. However, if one is not a fan of Carnival, this music gets lost in the broad choice of music for dry season, for summer, for fun times in the tropics, for dancing. Compare that to the proliferation and the increased engagement of dancehall/reggae. Now, look at reggaeton/Latin hip-hop, and see where the markets for consumption really are, and by extension where soca music has to look for new listeners.
I created the table above that shows the most popular Caribbean videos for the different genres on YouTube as of March 3, 2021. Note that it is not the tune’s popularity being counted, but the video. A song can have many videos and collectively generate multiples of the view statistics here, but for the purpose of this exercise, the focus was on artist-controlled channels. Where possible, official released videos are cited, but in a few cases, fan uploads provide multi-million views that can’t be ignored. Critical to this analysis of soca’s popularity are the numbers.
Some highlights from the table are that the number one soca video is the 2003 hit “Turn Me On” by Kevin Lyttle of St. Vincent, uploaded by Atlantic Records in October 2009, with 54,967,404 views. Next is Bajan star, Rupee’s 2003 tune, “Tempted to Touch”, uploaded by a fan, Gangstalatino123 in December 2008, with 41.4 million views, interestingly far and away that channel’s most viewed video. Rounding out the top 3 is Trinidadian Kes the Band’s 2017 hit, “Hello”, with 34.7 million views, and uploaded by New York aggregator and distributor JuliansPromosTV. Of the top 15 analysed, only 4 tracks did not use the services of JuliansPromoTV! By contrast, Machel Montano is the only soca artist whose YouTube channel is doing the business that music distributors are looking for, with 3 videos having over 10 million views each.
We see that legacy soca music, over 15 years old, gained significant viewership on YouTube over time. Also, songs from the mid to late 2010s dominate the top 15. The total views of the top 15 videos — original tracks, not covers or remixes — was 325.5 million. As a side note, the recent flourish of Trinibad music shows signs of instant popularity; for example, Prince Swanny has 25 videos on his channel released just in the last 2 years at 1 million views and higher, and one with over 10 million views, “Catch 22”, at 13 million. Another interesting side note is that reinterpreting soca for a new market has legs, it seems. Major Lazer’s soca-ish remix of Arianna Grande’s “All the love”, featuring Machel Montano has 72 million views. The cover of Anselm Douglas’s, “Who Let the Dogs Out” by the Baha Men has 70 million plus views, outpacing the view numbers for the original track by the original artist.
[Editor’s Note: The song “Champion” by Trinidad and Tobago/West Indies cricketer Dwayne “DJ” Bravo has over 100M views on YouTube! Many don’t consider it a soca song. Deal with it.]
Dancehall’s numbers move up by a factor of ten. Sean Paul had over 789 million views of his 2017 song, “No Lie”, featuring Dua Lipa, and the Shaggy classic from 2009, “Angel”, featuring Rayvon, clocks in at 304.5 million. Sean Paul has 5 songs over 250 million views, and his top 3 videos have higher viewership that soca’s top 15 aggregate of 325 million. As I said, outperforming soca by a factor of ten. Omi’s track, “Cheerleader”, remixed by Felix Jaehn as a tropical house jam, has a billion views, the most for English speaking Caribbean artists. The power of the collaboration and the remix to increase audience viewership is noted again. Even more, Argentinian reggae star Dread Mar-I shows the power of the Latino viewer with a whopping 637 million views of his Spanish language reggae hit, “Tu Sin Mi”.
And speaking of Latino power, the top seven reggaeton songs from Puerto Rican, Dominicans (DR), and Cubans are all over 2 billion views on the platform! Another factor of ten raised. “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee has over 7 billion views, the most for YouTube. Daddy Yankee has 7 videos with over 1 billion views each.
The domination of reggaeton and the impact of Puerto Rican talent and global Latino audiences are why every major label and all streaming platforms have expanded into the fastest growing music market in the world since 2019, Latin America. That should be where soca looks for growth. Kevin Lyttle found a new audience there recently with a collab with Colombian singer AstrA on his 17-year old hit, “Turn Me On”. Rupee tapped Daddy Yankee’s clout to remix “Tempted To Touch” one year after the original release. Rupee is still getting that song remixed, recently for the Indian market. I have written before about the collaboration route as a minimal key to hits, but the new paradigm suggests that who you know and who knows you better have more clout than you.
I read the blog post, “What measures an artist’s success in today’s music industry?” by Keith Jopling on Midia Research at the end of 2020, which led me to investigate, what were we measuring when we say, “X” song was the most popular for Carnival, and noting that TUCO is having a virtual road march for Carnival 2021, which won’t be on the road. How this connects to soca’s popularity is that we have to measure the artist’s popularity more than the song. More artists, doing the business of music with analytics to show, can provide a data-friendly environment for soca’s growth.
Chartmetric, an online music data analytics tool that aggregates both streaming and social data from many platforms, provides a snapshot of a career, tabulated here, with the measure of the Cross Platform Performance (CPP) of various top artists in their respective genres. It can also act as a guide of soca’s relative position versus dancehall and reggaeton. [Editor’s Note: As of February 2022, the CPP is now called the Chartmetric Artist Rank.]
As at March 3, 2021, Kevin Lyttle was the highest ranked soca artist, sitting just outside of the 5,000th position. The usual suspects from Trinidad, Machel, Kes, Patrice Roberts, Nailah, Bunji Garlin, Destra, and Fay-Ann rank with Bajans, Allison Hinds and Rupee, to round out the top ten. Of note, these artists mainly peaked between late December to late January of the following year, showing their connection and the music’s connection to the Trinidad Carnival cycle. Sean Paul and Shaggy out rank Vybz Kartel, Ziggy Marley, KONSHENS and Protoje among dancehall artists by multiples, peaking within the top 500 reported artists worldwide and trending within the top 200 at one point. Daddy Yankee and Luis Fonsi are at the top of the heap of reggaeton artists, both ranking within the top 100 artist worldwide. 100, 500, 5,000. You do the math. Soca music and soca artists have a way to go.
Streaming and popularity numbers matter as they too affect royalties. And those royalty dollars are already miniscule. The Caribbean has a number of factors working against a high royalty rate. Among other things, those royalty rates depend on:
- The listener’s country and location
- Whether the listener has a paid subscription or free account
- The specific artist’s royalty rate
- The relative pricing & currency in different regions
With the extremely low per-stream royalty rate for the region minimally supplying Spotify’s accounts payable, it’s important that soca’s numbers increase for the health of the industry and the business value of the genre. Outside is where soca has to thrive, and beyond Carnival. Market access may happen with Spotify’s introduction into the region, but regional governments, Caribbean Export Development Agency, and Caricom, which have been studying and putting out reports on the music industry since the mid-2000s, should be listening to regional music stakeholders as they begin their march outward for listenership and diversification delivery. Preparation of feasibility studies and reports are prolific here. Action and investment are preferred.
For Spotify to be more than a fad in the region, the business of music must happen, and proactive decisions and action by policy makers would be a change from the time when everyone believed music was entertainment while one worked, and musicians were hobbyists. A future of music analytics and potential growth is hoped for. The new kid on the block in streaming services could be a catalyst. That, and a determined effort by soca artistes to move outside the Carnival cycle. Being a big fish in a small pond may be exciting for one’s ego, but certainly not for one’s career. Think big!
© 2021, Nigel A. Campbell. All Rights Reserved.
