World Music Trends

Context

What plays in Brazil is not what plays in Korea, Mexico or Nigeria. Yet some songs cross borders and show up on the charts of dozens of countries at the same time. Every week, this dashboard gathers the top 50 most played songs on Apple Music in 171 countries and shows what each place is listening to, in which language, in which genre and how much of it comes from the country's own artists.

On the map, each country is colored by the share of homegrown music, its main language or its main genre in the top 50. Tap a country to open its chart, see what climbed and what entered this week, and find out which countries have the most similar taste. The other tabs compare regions, show where each language plays and put two countries side by side.

What the data shows

One track in 93 countries. In the November 2, 2026 snapshot, the song that travels the most is "Housewife" by Canadian singer Tate McRae, in the top 50 of 93 of the 171 countries. Next come "Nicole Kidman" by Slovak artist ADÉLA (82 countries) and "BbY WOW" by Colombia's Karol G with Judeline and rusowsky (70). But they are the exception: of the 4,146 different songs on the charts, three in four play in a single country.

English leads, but not alone. English is the most common language in the top 50 of 79 countries. Spanish leads in 18, nearly all in Latin America, plus Spain. In the other 74, the language that plays the most is the local one or another: French, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese, Chinese and many more. Korean shows up in the top 50 of 23 countries besides South Korea.

Who listens to their own music. In 16 countries, 80% or more of the top 50 is by local artists. India (98%), Egypt (96%), South Korea and Hungary (94%) and Greece (90%) lead the list, along with the United States and France. At the other end, in 53 countries less than 10% of the chart is homegrown. Brazil is among the countries that listen to their own music the most: 73% of its top 50 is Brazilian, with sertanejo, the local country-pop, taking almost half the spots.

Neighbors with the same taste. The most similar charts in the world are Honduras and El Salvador (94% similarity), Austria and Germany (89%) and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (86%). Brazil has a taste of its own: its closest match is Portugal, at only 28%.

Methodology

• Charts. Apple Music's "Most Played" list, top 50 for every country where the store operates, through Apple's public feed generator. Data is collected every Monday and one snapshot per week is kept, which makes it possible to follow climbs, drops and new entries.
• Artist origin. Taken from Wikidata through the artist's Apple Music identifier (country of origin, country where the band was formed or citizenship). When Wikidata has nothing, the search goes to MusicBrainz. If neither has it and the artist only charts in up to five countries, with at least half of their entries in one of them, that country is used as the likely origin. For collaborations, the first credited artist counts.
• Homegrown music. Share of the top 50 whose main artist is from the country itself, computed only over tracks with a known origin.
• Language. An estimate: it uses the title's script (Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Cyrillic and others), common words of each language in the title and, when the title gives no clue, the language the artist uses most in other titles or the main language of their country. Tracks charting in 15 or more countries with no clue in the title count as English. It can miss on short titles, such as proper names.
• Genre. The main genre Apple itself assigns to each track.
• Similarity between countries. Compares the two top 50 lists, giving more weight to the top positions. 100% would be the same chart in the same order.
• Limits. It shows what people play on Apple Music, not on every platform. In countries where Spotify, YouTube or local services dominate, the picture may be different.