This is the second in a two part series exploring the highly discussed "Decline of Hip Hop" in collaboration with music streaming & social data platform Chartmetric.
By Christine Osazuwa | 4th June 2024
Introduction
We are Shoobs, a dynamic event platform based in the UK, dedicated to connecting artists, promoters, and music enthusiasts through live events and experiences. We believe in the transformative power of events, where music tells a story, bringing people together and creating unforgettable moments.
With our focus on Black music and culture, since our inception, Hip Hop has always been a dominant genre on our platform and has been incredibly influential across all other genres.
Over the past years, there’s been an ongoing discussion that the once reigning genre of Hip Hop was in decline. What we wanted to understand here at Shoobs is whether that’s really the case and if so, why?
Part 1: Has the Share of Hip Hop Event Goers Declined Over the Years?
The best way we thought to approach this was by looking at events sold on Shoobs and how the attendance has changed over the years.
In order to do this, we looked at thousands of events and millions of tickets sold on the Shoobs platform since 2015. Any event labeled as Hip Hop was taken into consideration, though events can have multiple genres ascribed to them. Events can range from multi-day international festivals to day parties and brunches if music is a key component. The first finding is that Hip Hop has consistently been the number one genre on Shoobs since its inception.
2023 was still a monumental year for Hip Hop events with rappers doing headline shows, such as Young Jeezy, Hip Hop festivals like Rolling Loud Portugal, and artists that blur genre lines such as Burna Boy.
Despite an overall strong year, the market share of events on the platform has changed. In 2017, we saw a peak in Hip Hop event attendees with 48% of event goers attending at least one Hip Hop event that year. By 2023, that number had dropped to 43%. While not a huge decline, there was still an obvious trend downward with regards to Hip Hop event attendance.
The decline in Hip Hop events was subtle but steady from 2017 with the largest drop occurring during the COVID pandemic. Of course, overall event attendance was down significantly in 2020, but when people opted to and were able to attend events during that year, Hip Hop wasn't the top choice nearly as often as in the past. In fact, 18% of 2019 Hip Hop event attendees on Shoobs moved on to other genres in 2020. It’s very likely that the COVID pandemic gave music lovers the opportunity to explore new genres--we'll explore this more in subsequent sections.
So to answer our first question... "Have the portion of Hip Hop event goers declined over the years?"
Hip Hop remains our number one genre, however; we've seen a decline in Hip Hop's share of event goers from its peak in 2017 but by less than three percentage points overall. Genres like Amapiano and Afrobeats have seen a steady growth, in comparison to Hip Hop's more stable and consistent share.
Part 2: Is Hip Hop Still Important to Fans?
We’ve now established there has been a slight decline in Hip Hop’s event share, however, that was across all Shoobs event goers. While at Shoobs we have a niche of Black music and culture, our genres span everything from Classical to Latin.
To assess the importance of Hip Hop to it's fans, we classified Hip Hop fans as anyone who purchased tickets to three or more Hip Hop events in a year with Hip Hop amongst their top three genres for that year. We limited the scope to 2019, 2022 & 2023 due to the effects of COVID on the live music industry.
We then designated superfans as those fans with Hip Hop as their #1 genre for the year. The proportion of Hip Hop fans that were classified as superfans steadily increased from 81% of Hip Hop fans in 2019 all the way to 97% in 2023. Meaning, if you're a fan of Hip Hop events at all, you're very likely to essentially be a superfan of Hip Hop–it's your most important genre.
These numbers alone don't tell the full story though. When you look at other genres, we start to see a pattern emerge. As a reminder, an event can have multiple genres, therefore the following figures will total over 100%. In 2019, the next most important genre for Hip Hop fans was Bashment, with 31% of Hip Hop fans having Bashment as their #1 genre, followed by Afrobeats at 18%. One can conclude that in 2019, an average Hip Hop fan was almost exclusively only a Hip Hop fan and didn’t explore many other genres.
This shifted in 2022, when 63% of Hip Hop fans had Afrobeats as their #1 genre followed by Bashment at 53%. By 2023, Hip Hop was the #1 genre of 97% of our identified Hip Hop fans, though Afrobeats trailed closely behind at 91% followed by Bashment at 89%.
In 2019, only three genres were #1 for more than 10% of Hip Hop fans. In 2022, it was seven and by 2023 it rose to nine. So in these few years, instead of most Hip Hop fans being primarily only Hip Hop fans, they've become super fans of multiple genres. This is also likely due to the rise of multi-genre events, which we’ll get to in our next question.
In addition, since we identified a slight decline in Hip Hop by looking at our general audience, we wanted to see how many fans stuck around. Of those who were classified as fans of Hip Hop in 2019 and still using Shoobs in 2023, 85% still had Hip Hop in their top 3 genres as of 2023. Similarly, for those that were classified as Hip Hop fans in 2022, 92% still had Hip Hop in their top 3 genres in 2023. Again, this solidifies the overall importance of Hip Hop over the years.
So to answer our question of "Is Hip Hop still as important to Hip Hop fans as before?".
The answer is yes, Hip Hop is just as important as ever to Hip Hop fans as it ever has. However, other genres have become almost equally as important over the past 2 years.
Part 3: How Have Other Genres Influenced Hip Hop’s Trajectory?
Given the findings of the last question, it's clear that other genres play a key factor into how people are interpreting Hip Hop's decline. So, next we wanted to quantify that. Specifically, we want to know: "How has the growth of predominantly Black music genres impacted Hip Hop?"
In 2023, we wrote about the rise of Amapiano in 2022. We've loved to see the growth of the South African house genre within the UK and beyond. 2023 was still a great year for Amapiano, but as it became more ubiquitous, the love for dance music overall saw a huge surge. In 2023, half of our top 10 genres were dance genres and subgenres, including Amapiano.
Simultaneously, Afrobeats reclaimed it’s number two spot after Hip Hop, continuing to solidify the strength of music out of Africa, with concerts from Nigeria's Wizkid, Eswatini's Uncle Waffles, Congo's Fally Ipupa, and Ghana's Asakka Boys, and festivals such as Detty Rave in Ghana, Afro Nation in Portugal, and London's own AMA Fest, City Splash, and Maiden Voyage festivals all taking place in 2023.
Given the monumental growth of these genres specifically, we decided to approach the genre discussion by looking at Afrobeats and Amapiano in conjunction with Hip Hop.
Note: We didn't start tracking Amapiano as a standalone genre at Shoobs until 2021.
In 2017 and 2018, we saw a peak in the number of events on platform listed with only Hip Hop as a genre (4-5%) and also the largest percentage of Hip Hop events with at least two genres that were not also tagged with Afrobeats ranging from 42-44%.
By 2021, the percentage of events on platform that featured Hip Hop & Afrobeats surpassed Hip Hop events without Afrobeats, actually outnumbering by 2 to 1.
In 2022, with the rise of Amapiano and the first full year with the genre as a standalone genre, we saw a dramatic shift with events including all 3 genres of Amapiano, Afrobeats and Hip/Hop hitting 33% of all events on the Shoobs platform, with that increasing to 41% by 2023.
At its peak in 2017, 78% of events on Shoobs were tagged in Hip Hop as one of its genres. At its lowest in 2020, only 64% events were tagged with Hip Hop. The rise of Amapiano has contributed to the continued relevance of Hip Hop events in the UK, with combination events making up for the previous gap. In 2023, 75% of events were tagged with Hip Hop (falling just under its previous peak), though almost no events had a tag of solely Hip Hop.
Over the past decade, Hip Hop and Afrobeats have been a consistent combo averaging around a third of all events until the introduction of Amapiano. The share of Afrobeats & Hip Hop events declined slightly to around a quarter of all events. Amapiano’s rise directly corresponds with a decline of standalone Hip Hop and Hip Hop plus other genre events other than Afrobeats. In 2023, 90% of events on the Shoobs platform tagged with a music genre included the genres of Hip Hop, Afrobeats, and/or Amapiano.
Prior to 2021, the most commonly occuring event on Shoobs featured Hip Hop and at least one other genre. In 2021, the most common event featured Hip Hop and Afrobeats, and by 2022, the most common event featured Hip Hop, Afrobeats, and Amapiano.
Having the ability to select multiple genres really allows us to see the way Hip Hop is regarded. If event organisers needed to select a singular genre, it's entirely possible that a more drastic decline in Hip Hop events would have occurred, but with the option to select multiple genres, we’re able to see how the culture of events has evolved. Hip Hop has essentially been the dominant and de facto default genre for Black music events in the UK for well over a decade. As other genres grow in popularity, they're considered additive to Hip Hop rather than a replacement for Hip Hop.
So, now to answer our final question: "How has the growth of predominantly Black music genres impacted Hip Hop?"
The rise of other genres has been additive to Hip Hop. Now, music lovers are much more likely to go to an event and hear a consistent blend of Afrobeats, Amapiano, and Hip Hop, however; the expectation has always been to hear Hip Hop at a Black music event. Over the past decade that expectation has shifted very little and is approaching its 2017 peak.
In Conclusion:
The Ubiquity of Hip Hop
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Past Hip Hop events listed on Shoobs
It's easy to dismiss Hip Hop as a genre purely because of its ubiquity. In fact, it's completely out of the ordinary to not hear Hip Hop when attending an event because Hip Hop has bled into and influenced almost every mainstream genre in the world. From K-Pop to Latin Trap, you'll be hard-pressed not to hear a rapper in every language.
While Hip Hop has seen a slight decline in its proportion of event attendees and events from its peak in 2017, it remains a cornerstone genre. Hip Hop remains just as important as ever to fans, even while they expand their music tastes.
Discussing the decline of Hip Hop without addressing the influence of Hip Hop is a dangerous slippery slope to dismissing the power of the genre. The growth of music genres with Hip Hop influences from the continent of Africa, particularly Afrobeats and Amapiano, has had a significant impact on the music event landscape. The surge in these genres have not detracted from Hip Hop, but has instead enhanced the overall musical offering.
As genres continue to blur, music continues to get more diverse, events become more interesting, and fans get to explore and discover even more. We are currently celebrating 50 years of Hip Hop and it's abundantly clear it's become just as established as a genre in the cultural zeitgeist as pop and rock have, and should be treated as such.
Methodology
The following caveats should be taken into account for the above analysis:
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Shoobs Events & Audience Demographics: Shoobs is a platform specifically focused on Black and global majority cultural events, therefore; the vast majority of events on platform are focused on genres that have outsized popularity with the global majority. The majority of events take place in the UK, with a small portion in Europe & Africa.
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Event Genre Self-Reporting: Shoobs hosts thousands of events on our platform every year. Event organizers self-report the genres relevant to their events based on the genres of artists performing or the music that will be played throughout the event. While this information is self-reported, the event organizers have a vested interest in selecting the most relevant genres due to the expectations set for the audience attending the event.
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Terminology: Event goers, event attendees, and ticket purchasers are used interchangeably within this analysis. However, it’s not always possible to deduce the exact number of people who attended an event compared to how many purchased tickets for the event. In addition, a person who purchased multiple tickets will only be recognized once in calculations.
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Events Considered: Only events that had at least one sale and at least one genre associated with them are included in the analysis above.
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Genre Overlap: Events can have one or multiple genres. An event can have an unlimited number of genres ascribed to them.
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Event Scale: Our analysis includes a wide range of events, from small day parties and brunches to large multi-day international festivals.
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COVID-19 Impact: The pandemic significantly disrupted live events in 2020 and 2021, affecting attendance figures and trends in ways that may not reflect typical year-to-year changes
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Amapiano Tracking: Amapiano was not tracked as a standalone genre until 2021.