A year ago I made a post questioning whether the era of EDM is over, citing the dwindling number of EDM Top 40 hits and the lack of Calvin Harris and David Guetta in the charts as the reason.
I thought it would be interesting to see what's happened in the year since.
By my reckoning we've had 20 Top 40 hits you could put under the EDM banner over the past year. The first 4 of these came in the remainder of 2019. This included a Jax Jones hit that appeared on Christmas Top of the Pops.
None of the new entries in January this year were EDM and we had a solitary one in February from Joel Corry, who's apparently a fitness instructor and TV personality as well as a DJ. Then in March we had Jax Jones no doubt secure his place on this years Christmas Top of the Pops with the hit "Tequila" and then newcomer had a hit with an EDM cover of "Flowers" by Sweet Female Attitude.
By the end of April, a third of the way through the year, there had only been 3 EDM Top 40 hits. Then May gave us 3 more. By the end of June we were up to 7, but then July gave us a further 6 which included the number one hit "Head and Heart" by Joel Corry.
In September we saw Calvin Harris return to the Top 40 for the first time since January last year. However, this was with an R&B record rather than EDM. In the same month David Guetta had a single out, but this failed to make the Top 40.
One has to go back to the 80s for the last time we had 20 or less dance records in the Top 40 over a given year when it was only just getting started. Even before EDM was a thing and mainstream dance music popularity was in decline we would still have more that 20 Top 40 hits that were dance.
However, what we have to bear in mind is that we don't have the quantity of Top 40 hits overall that we used to have. Also, if we look at R&B, the genre Calvin Harris turned to with his latest hit, in the Top 40 over the past year we only have 9, so far less than EDM.
If you've been following my Top 40 leaderboard posts you'll know that the Top 40 these days is dominated by rap music. Between 2014-2016 we had less than 20 Top 40 hits each year that were rap.
The 2nd biggest genre in terms of number of hits in the past year is pop, which isn't really a genre as such more a generic term for popular music that doesn't fit a genre. The 3rd biggest is EDM.
It's not really dying then, it's just rap is much more popular. What will happen over the next year?
No comments:
Post a Comment