American Music Was Losing Prominence on the Global Stage — Until This Year

It’s a constant refrain in the modern music business: “A hit can come from anywhere.” 

The increasingly varied nature of hits, which now erupt from South Korea and South Africa and Mexico and carom from country to country in the nearly frictionless streaming landscape, has been reflected on Billboard’s two global charts. Halfway through 2022, 85% of top 10 hits on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. ranking were releases from artists outside of the mainland U.S. That number rose to 92% in 2023.

But unexpectedly, the big global hits in the first six months of 2024 came primarily from one place: America. 

Halfway through this year, U.S. acts accounted for 60% of the top 10 hits on the Global Excl. U.S. chart. And American artists were also responsible for the top eight songs on the Billboard Global 200 this summer. “American artists are crushing this year,” says Scott Cutler, co-CEO of Pulse Records. Pulse has contributed to the surge — the company signed Tommy Richman, whose bouncy, high-gloss “Million Dollar Baby” was No. 8 on the Global Songs of the Summer ranking. 

Executives attribute America’s show of musical might this year to three factors: The strength of the release calendar for U.S. stars, at a time when many prominent acts from outside the U.S. have been off cycle; the boom in country music, which is finding an increasingly global audience; and American labels’ increased emphasis on international marketing. 

U.S. global dominance in music used to be a given. But that changed as listeners around the world adopted streaming services, and the cost of making and marketing music plummeted thanks to new technology and social media platforms. “When the cost structure changes, local [music] bounces back,” Will Page, former chief economist at Spotify, told Billboard last year. 

In a 2023 paper, Page and Chris Dalla Riva, a senior product manager at the streaming platform Audiomack, documented this shift. They found that less than 20% of the top 10 songs in Poland, France, Netherlands and Germany were by local artists in 2012. A decade later, however, homegrown acts accounted for 70% of top 10s in Poland, 60% in France, 30% in the Netherlands, and 20% in Germany. The authors called this shift “glocalisation.”

That said, these country-by-country gains are probably partially obscured on Billboard‘s global charts, because they aggregate streaming and sales data from more than 200 territories, according to Glenn McDonald, the author of You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music. 

Imagine that Polish listeners are playing more Polish rap, but also some Sabrina Carpenter. Similarly, French listeners are enjoying more French rap, but dabbling in Carpenter’s discography as well. If you pool the two listening populations together, Carpenter will still be popular, but French listeners are unlikely to appreciate Polish rap, and vice versa. 

Still, it’s notable that the upper reaches of Billboard‘s global charts show such a pronounced uptick for American artists so far this year — defying the last two years of data as well as conventional wisdom about the increasingly competitive nature of the music industry around the world. 

Executives believe the surge is partly due to random chance. While superstars set their own schedules, either due to coincidence or competitive spirit, seemingly every American heavy-hitter has dropped an album this year. That group includes Ariana Grande, Ye, Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Future, Taylor Swift and Post Malone. 

At the same time, international powerhouses like Harry Styles have been quiet. The members of BTS are serving in the military, so they haven’t released much music or scored a major hit. (Jung Kook‘s “Seven” was Billboard‘s global song of the summer last year.) And recent albums from Dua Lipa and Ed Sheeran haven’t been as successful as past projects.

On top of that, “it feels like a new generation of stars are here” in the U.S., says Peter Kadin, senior vp of marketing at EMPIRE. “There was a void for a time after the pandemic. Now artists that have been developing for a few years have really come into their own.” EMPIRE has its own budding star in Shaboozey. Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Richman, Benson Boone and Teddy Swims have also scored breakout singles this year, giving the U.S. an unusually strong slate of hits from newcomers who can be promoted abroad. 

And it’s notable that some of these big singles are emerging from Nashville: Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is one of two country songs that finished in the top 10 in the song of the summer race on the Billboard Global 200. Luminate has surveyed a 12-week summer listening period for the past four years and found that streaming of country music outside America keeps rising. If international demand for the genre continues to increase, this gives U.S. labels another potential source of hits to export, one they couldn’t draw from the same way a decade ago.

Their approach to exporting has changed, too. U.S. labels once focused first on American consumers before looking abroad. Now they are often running global campaigns — or even starting promotion abroad, in territories where marketing is cheaper and fandom can be more of a social activity, before they begin a push Stateside. “It’s much easier to tap into all of these other markets because so much of promotion is digital now,” says Mike Weiss, head of A&R at United Masters.

Stellar, a Copenhagen-based marketing company, was founded in 2019 with the express purpose of helping artists find and nurture audiences in Southeast Asia and Latin America, which they might have neglected before streaming. The timing was right: “We have experienced a growing international focus from U.S. labels realizing the essential need for working artist campaigns with a global perspective,” says Felipe Martinez, Stellar’s head of Latin America. “Arguably U.S. labels have shown to be ahead of the curve in this understanding, while other markets seem to be more conservative in their international marketing efforts.”

At least this year, these efforts appear to be paying off for American artists. “If we see energy coming out of the Philippines or India,” Kadin says, “we’re going to run with it.”