Photo Credit: Wesley Tingey
What the f*!% happened to all the expletives? Now, just 13% of Spotify Top 50 tracks are tagged as explicit – down from closer to 70% in the not-so-distant past.
Those noteworthy stats come from data journalist Daniel Parris, who indicated that about 45% of Spotify Top 50 songs fell into the explicit bucket as of January 2018. The percentage went on to hit 74% later that year, bounce around (without dipping below 40%) before climbing back to 69% towards the top of 2022, and then gradually decrease en route to sinking to 13% at present, according to the breakdown.
That’s particularly significant given the artist concentration on the Global and U.S. Top 50 charts; it’s not a secret that certain big-name acts have multiple songs on the lists. Put differently, if seven total tracks from Olivia Rodrigo, Bad Bunny, Drake, and a few others slipped out of the Global Top 50, the explicit percentage would fall to a flat 0%.
What’s behind the trend? Parris covered two of the biggest potential contributors: Hip-hop’s declining popularity (or at least its declining commercial prevalence) and the continued reach of radio-friendly catalog releases.
Fan interest in said catalog releases – technically referring to projects that debuted over 18 months back, though many fall well outside this window – has been strong for some time.
Plus, big-budget biopics are presumably driving additional listeners yet to tracks from the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson, the latter of whom is occupying several Spotify Top 50 spots.
Next, K-pop’s international prominence (and its Top 50 presence) is well-known. It appears that only one of BTS’ hits is labeled explicit, for instance; the clean “Swim” is in the Global Top 50 right now.
(On the other hand, Blackpink member Jennie’s remix of “Dracula” by Tame Impala is one of the Top 50’s few explicit tracks, as is the “Iconic by Mistake” collaboration from Le Sserafim, Illit, and Katseye.)
Throw in growth for country music, generally and in terms of its Top 50 positioning, and it seems safe to say that major charting changes are afoot at Spotify.
A closing question: To what extent are these changes the result of evolving listenership habits across competing DSPs?
While we lack a definitive answer, it’s worth noting that Apple Music’s own Global Top 50 – meaning the upper half of its Top 100 chart – has a comparatively large 36% “explicit share.” Deezer’s Global Top 50, for its part, is clocking in at closer to the Spotify share with 14%.