Music Trends for 2022 and Beyond.

Understanding the trends in the music industry can play an important part in the success of a music festival. Organisers should do their best to anticipate which artists and genres they should focus on when curating their performance artists for forthcoming events as this will make them more attractive and easier to market to festival-goers.

There is not much regularly published data available on music and genre trends and it can be difficult to trawl through subjective opinions and promotional material to get to any real insight. Viberate is a research organisation that regularly publishes very accurate and insightful data on the industry. The data is collected through more than 1 million artists, venues, events, festivals and other music industry stakeholders All data is fully validated with powerful analytics tool processing of over 1 billion data points each day enabling popularity charts, insights and music trends. Viberate produced their last comprehensive report at the end of February this year.

Genres Trending. 
The key findings indicate that listening channels can be very genre specific. The most popular genres for online digital steaming channels is pop, rock and Hip-Hop, however Hip-Hop doesn’t get a look in when looking at radio spins. The Beatport online channel is dominated by Tech House and the electronic (EDM) genre continues its popularity when looking at music festivals where it is the most booked genre. Despite Hip-Hop's popularity on the digital streaming platforms it still gets relegated to a minority genre at music festivals. The emerging genre on YouTube has been coming from Asian Pop and Latin (especially Reggaeton). Multilingual music is rising on gatekeeper-free channels enabling non-English speaking artists to break into the mainstream. Rock and punk rock has had a resurrection too, particularly on the TikTok channel.

Social Media Platforms. 
Most performance artists post their material on SoundCloud but there is shift towards TikTok being the preferred channel. This is particularly true for new artists trying to breakthrough as they are getting more exposure and success from TikTok than traditional music channels like Spotify, Beatport and the radio. However, although TikTok can be great for talent discovery good content on Spotify can be the key to success as cross channel utilisation becomes more important. International artists are also using social media platforms like Twitter to launch material using a more personalised fan-based approach.

Live vs. Streamed. 
Even though streamed music has made great strides over the last 2 years because of the coronavirus pandemic the revenue earned by performance artists by streaming material is too small to make any discernible impact. It is the live event and festival appearance that pays their bills and the return of music festivals in 2022 is welcomed by artists and festival-goers alike.

For festival organisers planning their events using a software management platform like Festival Pro gives them all the functionality they need manage every aspect of their event logistics. The guys who are responsible for this software have been in the front line of event management for many years and the features are built from that experience and are performance artists themselves. The Festival Pro platform is easy to use and has comprehensive features with specific modules for managing artists, contractors, venues/stages, vendors, volunteers, sponsors, guestlists, ticketing, cashless payments and contactless ordering. 

Data and insight courtesy of Viberate Ltd.
Photo by Wolfgang via Pexels.

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