Looking at the charts here in Spain, I have noticed a sharp decline in the consumption of music in English over the last decade. In 2013, 60% of the songs were in English, in 2017 it was 33% and last year it was only 4%.
Apart from the UK and Ireland, for obvious reasons, has a similar phenomenon occurred in other European countries?
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I haven’t noticed that. If anything I have noticed more UK TV shows whereas it seemed we had stronger US dominance in shows before.
Music-wise we always had a big domestic scene.
A lot of modern pop music sucks, IMO. So I wouldn’t be surprised. The lyrics don’t matter, nothing is lost one way or the other. Not like Taylor Swift or Miley Cyrus or even Daddy Yankee are exactly poets. It works for the kind of easy digested pop music that is popular right now, and it’s a matter of taste I realize, but really it barely matters, I think.
Anyway, looking at the German charts, I see a fair bit of English still: [https://www.offiziellecharts.de/charts](https://www.offiziellecharts.de/charts)
I don’t have the stats but that is the impression I get. Music in English is still popular of course, but I see more and more music in Portuguese (and to a lesser extent in Spanish) on the top most listened tracks on Spotify in Portugal.
In the Netherlands Dutch music started being on the rise again roughly a decade ago and has held its position firmly since. Not sure if it outpaces the English music at a (much) higher rate but it is refreshing.
There is a definitely noticeable increase in Dutch languaged pop music compared to 10 years ago. For a long time it was mostly just hiphop or more traditional music in Dutch, and all pop music was always in English. Whereas right now the biggest pop artists sing in Dutch.
Yes. In 2016 (when the Portuguese singles chart was established), [all of the #1s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_number-one_singles_of_2016_(Portugal)) were in English and from international artists. Nowadays, they’re mostly in Portuguese, be it the European or Brazilian variety ([2024](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_number-one_singles_of_2024_(Portugal)), [2025](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_number-one_singles_of_2025_(Portugal))).
I think streaming has a lot to do with it, since national artists have a much easier way of getting on playlists. Plus, local rap music was always popular, but there was never an accurate way to measure it since iTunes never took off here. The singles market was basically dead from ~2008 to 2015.
Sweden: On streaming top lists yes, on commercial radio no.
Radio still has mostly English language songs but many of those are sung by local artists.
There is however some seasonal variations with more Swedish songs in summer.
Definitely yes. Nowadays Finnish music dominates the charts and English-language music barely makes a blip.
A year or so I was listening to a Belgian radio station who commented on this.
Apparently with Brexit it became more difficult for bands from the UK to come and do tours on the mainland.
This gave the local and other non English musicians more space.
How true this is? I dunno. I’m just a human with a keyboard (and fountains pens)
Finnish charts show a lot of Finnish music on too, but that is very short lived loop. Most songs hit the charts for a week, then they are mostly forgotten.
Hard to say.
I only noticed that music in languages other than polish and english vanished nearly completely. Around ’00s you could hear songs in french, german, italian, swedish, russian, spanish etc. Nowdays it’s only polish, english and a token summer hit in spanish
Spain is not a good example, because shitty reggaeton music from Latam has invaded the mainstream music channels since a decade or so. 90% of the “music” on the main radio and TV programs is Latin, or even worse, a Spanish “singer” posing as a Latin American. The main record labels in Spain only go for that kind of music, and they pay huge amounts of money to the radio channels such as 40 principales to feature their bands.
Luckily, the rest of Europe is free of this shit. I can only hope that, for once, we imitate them asap.
The dominance of Puerto Rico and people faking a variation of Miami to Puerto Rican accent in Spanish chart lists since Covid is impressive. They killed English and even Colombian and Spanish singers sound like that now.
It’s more like we didn’t have a lot of good mainstream music with Austrian origin for ages. Christina Stürmer was the sole well received Austro-pop interpret from what feels like 2003-2015.
It was around 2015 when things took off: we finally had wanda, seiler & speer, edmund, …
Ever since then we got more and better bands. What makes them special is that quite a lot of songtexts are in dialect, not even a German could understand the songs without subtitles. Makes it almost worghless on the international market, but utterly beloved by Austrians. Earning them a loyal fanbase.
I think this trend was already ongoing in some places, but the Covid lockdowns may have sped it up.
When artists tour intercontinentally you need a ton of logistics to ship instruments, staging elements, etc. overseas (whereas within a continent you would just use trucks). A lot of these companies had a really rough time with Covid-related tour cancellations. Between 2020-23 a lot went out of business or on life support, and even when live music came back some simply weren’t willing to take the gamble Covid wouldn’t return so they didn’t take intercontinental jobs.
As a result many European music festivals and concert promoters/venues ended up booking far more local artists (who are often cheaper), a trend which I think has sustained.
I don’t know about specific numbers, but I remember thinking a couple of years ago that there were suddenly a lot more Norwegian language songs in the top charts than there used to be back in the 2000-2010s.
I don’t think English language music is any less popular than before, but I think Norwegian language pop music has had a great resurgence and become a lot more mainstream among teens/young adults than it used to be 10-30 years ago. So we see a lot more Norwegian artists choosing to sing in Norwegian rather than English, which used to be seen as the default “cool” language, while Norwegian was seen as “old-fashioned” and “uncool”. I’m happy to see that this perception seems to be gone now with Gen Z.
I think it’s because of the decline of pop music that was popular in early 2010s : Katy Perry, pitbull, black eyed peas etc
Same here in Italy, nowadays youngsters only listen to trap and hip-hop in their native language, American pop isn’t as catchy as it used to be and people shifted their interest in national songs.
I don’t think that music in English has necessarily decreased in popularity, but Dutch language music has had a big resurge in the last 10 or so years. Especially younger people have started to appreciate Dutch music more and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that Anglophone pop music has mostly become bland and boring.
Dutch hiphop has been popular for a while now, but Dutch pop and levenslied (chanson-ish music) have regained the popularity they had in the late 20th and early 21st century. The Dutch punk scene is also growing.
Funnily enough this phenomenon is sort of happening in Ireland. One of our most popular artists at the moment is an Irish language hip hop group that’ve helped revive interest in the language.
I dunno – they play a lot of American and British music on the radio. I guess people like it or they wouldn’t keep it up.