In 2011, my co-founder and I came up with the idea of Deezer. We had a lot of questions related to music consumption, tastes, and preferences.
Our questions ranged from the influence of the internet on music consumption in the Arab region to whether people were listening to more international or local music. But by far the most important question was: “what are people listening to?”
The first thing we did was look at what was happening in Western countries. In France, for example, people listened to rap and hip-hop. In Germany it was heavy metal, and so on.
We wanted to find out what kind of music people were listening to in the Arab region so we could adapt our service to suit their needs. This is when we decided to analyze our data and asked ourselves: What Kind of Music Are You Listening To?
I was curious to analyze the music consumption and preferences of different Arab countries. I was wondering how many artists and genres are popular on Spotify in each country and what kind of music is listened to by the different groups.
So, I wrote a script that scrapes data from Spotify Charts (https://spotifycharts.com/regional) for each country (including the U.S.). It gets the top 50 tracks for the past month for each country, then gets the artist name and genre tags for each track.
Then it stores this information in a MongoDB database, with a separate collection for each country. In addition, it creates another collection that contains the genre counts for all of these countries (since some genres are more popular in some countries than others).
Finally, it exports this data as a CSV file ready to be analyzed!
In this blog post, we are going to look at the Arabic countries’ music preferences and consumption. We adopted a different approach in this post by exploring the Arabic countries’ music consumption and preferences using the Spotify API and Spotify’s Web Playback SDK.
The idea behind this blog is to show how much people listen to music on Spotify and what type of music they prefer. We will also attempt to understand why people listen to music? Is it because they are happy or sad? Or maybe they like to listen to music when they exercise?
We will also take a look at which time of day people like to listen to music, where they are listening (home, work, or out), what type of devices do they use, etc.? And lastly, we will analyze the average listening times (length) of the top tracks during the weekdays and weekends.
How did we analyze the data?
To help us answer these questions, we created a simple application that enables users to connect their accounts with our application. Once connected, we were able to collect statistics about their listening habits. Our application also featured a listener profile page that provided listeners with an overview of their most listened songs through graphs and charts.
A look at the most popular genres of music listened to by people in Arabic speaking countries and the amount of time spent listening to them.
A few years back, an infographic came out that showed how much time people spend listening to music around the world, as well as the most popular genres in each region. This got me thinking about what kind of music we’re listening to in Arabic speaking countries, so I did some digging.
The infographic was created by Spotify using data from their platform. Unfortunately, Spotify is not available in many Arab countries yet (as of this writing only Tunisia has access), so I had to find other data sources.
I found a few surveys and studies that tried to gain insight into the preferences and habits of Arab music consumers but most were done before 2015, which made me wonder if anything has changed since then. It was also hard to find reliable info on the time spent listening to music because most surveys focused on song downloads or streaming options. In other words, there wasn’t enough data out there on some important metrics like time spent listening and preferred genres. So I decided to do my own survey using Google Surveys.
I am a music lover, I listen to music all the time in my car, while studying, working and even when I am asleep! I can’t help it, music is part of my life.
I was wondering what kind of music people around the world are listening to; so I decided to do a research about that.
The first country that came to my mind was Egypt (my country) because of its diversity in music, you find a lot of different styles: Pop, Arabic Music, Rap and Hip Hop.
About 18 months ago I started collecting data from the top 10 songs on youtube and iTunes for each month in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
In this article I will be analyzing Egyptian and UAE’s Top songs for about 15 months.
As for data collection, I wrote a python script that downloads the top 10 songs from youtube for each month starting from January 2016 until now (April 2017). The same thing with iTunes.
The idea is to extract some features from each song like: beats per minute (BPM), loudness, danceability… etc. Then analyze these features and see if they have any correlation with being on the top 100 or not.
“The effect of the first world on the Arab countries’ music” is the title of an article published in Al-Hayat (October 18, 2013). It is a rather interesting title that caught my attention.
The article begins by talking about how the new Arabic music has changed over time. The author talks about how a young Egyptian singer, Mohamed Mounir, was “one of the most famous artists in Egypt and other Arab countries for more than three decades.” Today, however, he has lost much popularity in Egypt and Saudi Arabia due to his opposition to Islamism and his support for those who oppose it.
The main theme of the article is the changing nature of Arabic music in the face of globalization. The author states that “the wave of change that followed the fall of communism had no impact on the music industry in Egypt.” This seems to be a result of two factors:
1. The emergence of a new generation of young Arabs who are not interested in listening to music from their countries of origin. The new generation prefers Western music, which is more accessible today through satellite television and internet;
2. The decline of Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism as political forces in many parts of the Arab world have led to a decline in
The Arabic world has produced a lot of Arabic Electronic Music (AEM). AEM has been growing in popularity since the early 2000s.
Arabic Electronic Music is an umbrella term used to describe a wide range of musical styles, including pop, rock, hip hop, and rap. It can also be used to describe any type of music that originated in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, such as Turkish rock music or Iranian traditional music. However, it is generally not considered to be part of the genre itself.
Arabic Electronic Music is characterized by its unique sound and beat patterns. AEM’s sound consists of drums, bass lines, synthesizers and other electronic instruments. The beats are often repetitive and repetitive loops are used throughout songs to give them their signature feel.
The term “Arabic” refers to an ethnic group who speak Arabic as their first language. This includes people from countries like Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria and others. Although many people think of Arabs when they hear the word “Arabic”, this is not true for everyone who lives in this area – there are many non-Arab speakers living in MENA countries too!
The term “electronic” is used because most AEM artists use electronic equipment such as