A more updated ASEAN population age histogram shows the population in 2017 growing to 642M, with the “pre-music” age group (under 10) bulge now moving into what could be considered “prime” music discovery years (late teens/early 20s).

Politically, the region has been organizing itself as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) since 1967 to stabilize the region in the post-Cold War era. Beginning with Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore, and now totaling ten member states (Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Brunei), ASEAN countries formed the 7th largest economy in the world in 2014, the 3rd largest population in the world (622M), and had over half of its own population under the age of 30, which helps explain the huge music streaming consumption numbers we uncovered in May 2019.

Inevitably, this means our Western listening habits are silently but intimately intertwined with the tastes of Latin Americans and South/SE Asians, via 1s and 0s flying between our smartphones all over the world.

The idea is that streaming algorithms reward the best-performing tracks by highlighting/playlisting them more. But unlike the physical sales, big media, or terrestrial radio of yore- where national economies frequently siloed audiences- hungry tech companies want to scale everywhere.

In May 2019, we explored Chaz Jenkins’ concept of “ trigger cities ”: how global streaming platform algorithms like Spotify and Apple Music are putting today’s voracious listening appetites of Latin American, South Asian, and Southeast Asian cities at the forefront of tomorrow’s Western hits.

Southeast Asia awaits…what music will they hear from you next? (Photo by Florian Wehde )

But whatever the reasons, in keeping with the Hollywood movie parallel, hip-hop certainly seems like music’s equivalent of American comedy movies : highly localized to culture and thus doing great business domestically, but lacking mainstream resonance in certain regions overseas.

On top of that, it’s worth remembering the data source, Shazam, an audio identification app that is used typically in public spaces (e.g., club, store, party) and with a heightened sense of curiosity. So, Southeast Asians maybe are either never hearing hip-hop out in public, are already too familiar with it, or simply just like pop music more.

Since their start in 2015, 88rising’s focus has leaned towards engaging Western underground culture with Asian talent, with mostly North American city tour stops and English-language meme content on their socials. In late 2017, they did tour SE Asia in five cities, but on the whole, the region does not seem to be its target population.

What’s behind that is hard to say. Certainly, Rich Brian (Indonesia) and other stars of the NYC-based entertainment company 88rising have been making waves globally, showing Westerners especially a different perspective on hip-hop culture.

Also, it’s worth noting the virtual absence of Hip-Hop/Rap genre tags. While western Europe showed mixed preferences and the US a clear one, the SE Asian region clearly couldn’t care less about hip-hop or rap (at least those using Shazam), the genre only making a 10th place appearance in Jakarta’s chart with 4 tags.

From Singapore’s 41 pop genre tags to Jakarta’s 40 to Kuala Lumpur’s 37 down to Bangkok’s 30, an overwhelming Southeast Asian love of pop music in the past month would be an understatement, especially relative to the western European and US perspective.

Look at what is happening in Southeast Asia, the home of several global trigger cities:

Several news outlets ( Forbes , Billboard , Grammys , Business Insider ) since 2017 have heralded the language of the streets as the most streamed genre in the US today, but despite being the world’s #1 recorded music market , American preferences don’t always influence what resonates elsewhere.

Across the Atlantic, in the birth country of hip-hop and rap culture, the three most populated US cities (New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago) heavily listen to hip-hop above all else, with 30+ “Hip-Hop/Rap” genre tags in each city, relegating pop music to at least half the amount of tags each time.

Latin music understandably takes 3rd place in Madrid through its linguistic connection, and Paris has always had a strong Hip-Hop/Rap presence (hence its 1st place recently)…but all things said, nothing too surprising here.

Western Europe has shown a moderate preference for pop music, as seen in the above Shazam chart occurrences in the past month, going by track genre tags. Each of these charts take the top 100 most occurring tracks, and then compiles their genre tags, roughly approximating which sounds resonate the most locally.

But if we take a look at the most Shazam chart occurrences in the past month, you might be surprised at each region’s preferences.

There is certainly a preference for pop music in Southeast Asian territories, which may not be a surprise, no matter where you’re talking about. It is called popular music for a reason.

Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame (2019) is set to become the highest-grossing film of all-time , currently at $2.7B in ticket sales…and 70% of that came from outside the US.

Or since we Americans love more of anything: how about a whole cast of superstars?

It’s been a long-known industry fact that Hollywood action movies perform well at foreign box offices. Dwayne Johnson, some explosions, and heroic efforts to save those in peril are understandably universal themes.

Spotify in SE Asia: Where to Deliver Western Fare In SE Asia, Spotify seems to be the place where Western artists (with a smattering of K-pop ones) connect with local fans. This became apparent when we took the Top 10 Artists by Spotify Monthly Listeners (MLs) in each of the top six Southeast Asian cities by streaming levels, and aggregated them. From here, we start to see how good Spotify is at delivering Western content to this part of the world:

Southeast Asia: Top 10 Artists by Spotify Monthly Listeners by City

There is a world of insights here: the obvious one is that K-pop group BLACKPINK is currently the hottest act throughout the region, having 2.11M MLs in the past month, who we’ll discuss later with YouTube. AWAL-backed American independent artist Lauv slides into the #2 most popular Spotify artist (2.10M MLs). In 2017, he had a Southeast Asian-centric playlist evolution with “I Like Me Better”, so for his team, this should not be a surprise. From the artist perspective, it’s plain to see that with the exception of BLACKPINK, all other artists have US/UK origins (though UK-born Alan Walker grew up in Norway). Given Spotify’s northern European origins and that its most followed/playlisted artists are also of Western origin, this could be considered a natural fit, though the platform is quite global and astute at trying to focus on local repertoire.

Bangkok, Thailand: Top 10 Artists by Spotify Monthly Listeners by City

At the city-level, there are a few givens and a few surprises: even though Bangkok is the 2nd most populous city (10.3M) of the six listed, it seems to march to the beat of a different drummer. Only agreeing with its sister cities on BLACKPINK and Lauv, local listeners most favor a hometown artist named Wonderframe, the 3rd most listened to at 87K MLs. Wonderframe, the Thai pop electronica star with “อยู่ดีๆก็… (Feat. YOUNGOHM)” (released Dec 2017, currently at 120M YouTube views) Working under the Wayfer Records/Warner Music Thailand umbrella, the former singing competition star is now operating at the highest levels in-country, consistently releasing YouTube videos with millions of views and thousands of comments. At the regional-level, another takeaway from the six-city Spotify chart is how Western-savvy and in-tune Jakarta (10.6M people), Singapore(5.8M) and Quezon City (2.9M) are. Jakarta favors eight of the top 10 regional artists, Singapore nine, and Quezon City seven. So within Spotify, they are arguably cities with similar sonic tastes, and can conceivably be marketed to in similar ways on the platform.

Ho Chi Minh City’s Top 10 Artists on Spotify, seemingly on their own sonic island

In stark contrast, Ho Chi Minh City-Vietnam’s most populous city-seems to exist in its own silo. More commonly known as Saigon, locals far prefer Korean acts (8 of the top 10), sharing a love of K-pop boy band SEVENTEEN with Bangkok.

Mỹ Tâm, Vietnam’s “Queen of V-pop”, is a baby artist on Spotify, but dominates on YouTube

The city’s #1 most listened-to artist on Spotify is their “queen of V-pop”, Mỹ Tâm. Voicing a number of Vietnamese ballads on Spotify with around 1–2M spins each, this is yet another example where platform means everything. Though a “small” artist on Spotify, Mỹ Tâm’s YouTube channel has accumulated over 850M channel views, releasing several videos per month and being no stranger to double-digit million-count music videos. More surprising however, is Ho Chi Minh City’s 3rd most listened to artist on Spotify, Nashville’s Landon Austin. Landon Austin and Lindsay Ell’s cover of Maroon 5’s “Sugar” (2015) What does Landon (who is not Vietnamese) do? US pop covers in English, but featuring a focus on pristine vocals and a soft veneer of acoustic guitars and pianos, apparently making it catnip for Southeast Asia’s love of very friendly, non-controversial pop music. Landon Austin’s Top Cities by Monthly Listeners…where is your passport already?! Checking his top five cities by Spotify monthly listeners, they are all in the SE Asian region…Austin should be touring Southeast Asia like a madman! YouTube in SE Asia: Domestic vs. Western Repertoire If you checked out the first Trigger Cities installment, you might recall the below chart on total YouTube Views by City in one week in May 2019 among the 1.6M+ artists we track at Chartmetric: Top 10 Cities by YouTube views (May 2019, one week) While Latin America and India dominated the Top 10, Bangkok stood out as the 2nd most YouTube-hungry city in the world for that week, accumulating over 38M views. Only Latin America’s Mexico City beat them out with 51M+ views. But past the pure consumption numbers, who’s hot in Thailand’s capital, and more broadly, the rest of SE Asia’s biggest cities? The K-Pop Factor Remains Unsurprisingly, BLACKPINK and BTS, two of Korea’s biggest international acts, consistently appear in the top 10 artists by YouTube daily video views over the past month in SE Asia. Though its had its occasional hiccups over THAAD missile defense systems, K-pop has a long history of dominating the wider Asian music market, consistently drowning out J-pop (despite Japan being the #2 music market) or C-pop (despite China having 27x more people).

BLACKPINK (top) and BTS (bottom) continue K-pop’s regional reign (images by newsen and LG)

As a matter of fact, BLACKPINK leads the pack in five of the six major SE Asian cities: all way from tiny Singapore (136K daily views) to the gargantuan Bangkok (1.3M daily views). BTS, less so: still impressively appearing in the top 10 for five of the cities (Ho Chi Minh City-#2, Quezon City-#3, Kuala Lumpur-#5, Bangkok-#7, Jakarta-#8), their appeal in the past month seems secondary to BLACKPINK’s. Though BTS currently does not appear at all in Singapore’s top 10 YouTube artists, it should not be forgotten their YouTube success in the region has done much to bolster the seven-member group to its current global status.

Southeast Asia: Top 10 Artists by YouTube Views by City (past month)