medimops (a momox GmbH brand), Europe’s largest online marketplace for second-hand cd’s and records, has released a study showing the countries that exert the most musical influence worldwide. As a multicultural company and music-lovers themselves, medimops wanted to see if they could contribute to the time-honoured debate of which nation influenced whom using a unique data-driven approach. Determining musical influence is no easy task, however, the company looked to modern music streaming services to determine the extent of each country’s musical output and reach, combining ‘play’ and ‘view’ data with other measures of artist recognition and support systems. The resulting index offers the most comprehensive dataset about musical influence to date, revealing the 30 countries whose contributions have had the greatest impact on the global music landscape.

How the study was conducted:

medimops began the study by analysing music streaming data across multiple platforms – Spotify, Youtube and iTunes/Apple Music – to identify the most popular artists around the world and where they and where they were born.* This was then narrowed down to the top 30 countries worldwide. Each artist’s global influence was determined through a scoring system that measured their popularity outside their country, language, and cultural group of origin. The number of internationally-renowned artists that were born in each country was also found, reaching all the way from classical musicians like Bach, to modern-day artists like Beyoncé. To add further context, medimops consulted an ethnomusicological study on the uniqueness of local sounds, identifying how distinct each country’s traditional and folk music styles were from others.

It was important to understand how far each country supported the development of a local music ecosystem, so the company looked into the existing infrastructure, ranging from the number of music schools and major labels to the percentage of people working in the music industry. Local demand and support for live music were determined by investigating how popular a country was as a destination for major artist tours/concerts over the last five years.

Finally, to also determine which type of music is produced most in each country, medimops measured musical output based on four different genres – pop, electronic, rock, and classical. By combining these indicators of historical development, global music reach, and local artist support, medimops was able to calculate the first-ever Global Influential Music Index, which uses data to showcase the worldwide influence of each country’s musical output.