Now, I’m happy to confess that I’m old enough to date from a time before rap music. That sounds such a weird thing to say, the idea that a massive genre hadn’t actually occurred yet, but much like EDM, rap has started and grown in people’s lifetimes. I also remember someone commenting that rap was a phase… and plenty of UK snobbery over the US genre. But it very much isn’t a phase. So, how big is rap now?
According to BPI data, a fifth of all streamed songs in 2020 in the UK were rap and hip hop, showing that not only is rap a genre that’s here to stay, it’s here to dominate. Again, this might not seem a news story if you came into this world in 2000 and have always found rap a fascinating and lively musical force that’s growing, but for some of us… we feel the questions posed back then have been answered. We’ve seen it grow and rap is now very much an adult.
That rap stat is going to be higher because of a lot of guest slots in things like pop and dance. In other stats, rap was 12.2% of the album market, and 22% of the singles market.
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