COVID-19’s Effect on the Global Music Business, Part 2: Geography

We analyzed YouTube daily video views across six countries to help you understand global music consumption trends during the coronavirus pandemic. Here’s what we found.

Key Takeaways

• South Korea: Top 100 Artist YouTube consumption tended to have an inverse relationship with both coronavirus cases and web interest, indicating Koreans traded music for information as infections peaked. However, as a result of effective testing and tracing, the country rebounded quickly to normalcy on all fronts.
• Italy: Daily videos views for the Top 100 Italian artists dropped as infections increased but quickly rebounded with quarantine, generally following the infection curve from there.
• United States: The US Top 100 YouTube artists surged during lockdown, but as daily infections continued to rise, that demand failed to keep pace, perhaps because consumers turned to other non-music content or other sources of entertainment as the reality of sheltering in place indefinitely started to set in.
• South Africa: Web- and YouTube-based interest in coronavirus correlated with a late-March spike for both daily infections and also daily Top 100 Artist YouTube views. Unlike other countries, for South Africa, music and information seemed to go hand in hand on YouTube during COVID-19.
• Brazil: Once the celebratory period of Carnival died down for Brazil, the coronavirus crisis started to become real for the country, and Top 100 Artist YouTube consumption started increasing, followed by a slow decline for the next month — a decline, unfortunately, that’s not mirrored by daily infections, which numbered close to 6K by the end of April.
• India: There was a striking decline in Top 100 Artist YouTube consumption here, perhaps a result of national school closures — or maybe because of over-the-top (OTT) mediums and news taking attention away from the YouTube platform altogether.

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