Best-Selling Music: Data from 1910 to 2024

This video provides a comprehensive analysis of the monetary dominance of music genres within the music market from 1910 to 2024. By segmenting artists into their associated genres, this study aggregates their cumulative sales figures to determine the annual market size of each category, measured in U.S. dollars. Inflation adjustments are intentionally omitted to maintain historical accuracy in nominal terms.

The data includes sales from physical formats such as phonograph cylinders, shellac records, vinyl LPs, cassette tapes, and compact discs for earlier years, transitioning to digital downloads and streaming platforms (e.g., Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music) for recent decades. This integration ensures accuracy across a century of evolving distribution methods.

Genres are categorized using a color-coding system to group subgenres into broader stylistic families. Additionally, golden stars denote genres that held the number one position in market size during any year. Although the statistics are primarily based on U.S. sales data, occasional supplementation with European figures allows this dataset to serve as a global proxy due to the U.S. and Europe's outsized share in global music revenues. The video presents annualized figures.

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Hi, I'm Sasha.
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[DataIsBeautifulOfficial]

To make it more transparent to my viewers, here are some examples of well-known artists from various music genres that are included in the dataset:

*Country:* Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, Johnny Cash
*Jazz:* Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, John Coltrane
*R&B:* Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Beyoncé
*Rock & Roll:* Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley
*Rockabilly:* Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly
*Pop Rock:* Coldplay, Maroon 5, The Beatles
*Soul:* Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder
*Classic Rock:* The Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin
*Funk:* James Brown, Prince, Parliament-Funkadelic
*Hard Rock:* AC/DC, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath
*Disco:* Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, Bee Gees
*New Wave:* Talking Heads, Blondie, Duran Duran
*Techno-pop:* Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, New Order
*Punk:* The Sex Pistols, The Clash, Ramones
*House:* Frankie Knuckles, Armand Van Helden, Daft Punk
*Indie Rock:* Arctic Monkeys, The Strokes, Vampire Weekend
*Eurodance:* Aqua, 2 Unlimited, Vengaboys
*Techno:* Carl Cox, Richie Hawtin, Sven Väth
*Alternative Rock:* Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Radiohead
*Electro:* The Chemical Brothers, Justice, Daft Punk
*Hip-Hop/Rap:* Tupac Shakur, Jay-Z, Nas
*K-Pop:* BTS, BLACKPINK, EXO

[HighAltitudeMMA]

Lol you broke "rock music" up into like 50 different sub genres but didnt do that for country or hip hop lol

[MrBlxlife]

This channel is awesome, since day one!

[cahoros]

Country fans: Hold my cowboy hat, we've been winning since forever!

[MUTV]

electronic music got split into a lot of sub-divisions. I feel like hip hop/rap has a ton of subdivisions as well. Would be interesting to see electronic as one genre instead of split up. Just call it EDM. On the final screen 5:43, if you add electro, techno, house together it becomes #1 as a genre.

[eagleeyetenne]

Really interesting, but where is Pop Music? Which category are normal pop stars like Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift?

[nryanc]

We all saw that, right? Funk was making its move and then disco didn’t even bother saying ‘excuse me’. 😂

[doggo]

I'm a little shocked the electro pop era of 2007-2014, the tropical pop/house era of 2014-2017 and the disco/synthpop revival era of 2020-2024 didn't show up in this video!

Like for instance, Flowers, blinding lights, stay, levitating, save your tears, espresso etc are all some of the biggest songs of post pandemic era music, ALL would fit roughly into the same categories as Disco/synthpop. Interesting it didn't show up.
Regardless great video!!

[chaosjacky]

Really didn't expect for country to be at the top so many times

[DWINC]

Alternative Rock was HUGE in the 90s.
Nirvana was catagorized as alternative rock……not punk.

[jaredwallace]

Dubstep stayed longer than I predicted

I'm surprised to see country shrink after 2001, I felt like it was everywhere post 9/11

[sergiodemichele]

There's a genre missing in the last 10 years of statistics: shit (it would definitely be in first place)

[Billinois]

Note that this is best SELLING music. Blues music was there all along, being the heavy influence on most of what is popular today, but you wouldn't know it by this analysis. The people who were making that music were too poor to buy the albums, so they could only go hear them perform at small clubs.

[maaravi]

Interesting: The Jazz boom was much later than many believe (as often depicted in contemporary film) and the disco spike was much sooner. Country & Western is a mainstay.

[anthonyvandeist]

Looks like Disco had a slower, more drawn out death than I thought.. Thanks for the vid!!

[Armosk]

Let's hope reggaeton never reaches the top spots

[EdgarRoock]

Should have played samples from the leading genre instead of the standard tune.

[darrenkenny-xg]

This video is well made and shows excellent stats. Few other genres is missing from list like Adult Contemporary, Dance-pop and Blues music. Should pop rock under dark blue colour instead of yellow as it is subgenre of rock music?

[DioneN]

Watching that jazz take off!
“Come on babe why don’t we paint the town
And all that jazz
I’m gonna rouge my knees and roll my stockings down
And all that jazz”

[AvobProject]

The resurgence of Ragtime in the 1930s-40s surprised me. Maybe there were people in their middle age around then, buying up collections of it based on their memories of the 1900's, meanwhile total ablum sales had not yet exploded, since kids were not buying music in bulk until the 1950s. (Or perhaps the editor lumped in a lot of piano jazz into the Ragtime bucket.)