Want to know what’s the most popular tracks the Middle East? In a landscape that lacks Billboard, now we’ll finally have a metric on what is truly trending in the region.
YouTube launched YouTube Charts today in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE, a collection of charts that list the top songs and artist in each country on a weekly basis.
The move is set to be transformative for the Arabic music industry, which will offer a transparent and streamlined look into what’s truly popular in the region.
YouTube has long been a huge tool for music discovery both old and new in the MENA region, and a hug eway that artists such as Mohammed Ramadan judge their own popularity.
August 2021, there are 170 music channels in MENA with more than one million subscribers, compared to only 18 in August 2017, a growth of 800 percent.
OK so how will this work?
The Top Songs list in YouTube Charts will include up to 100 songs which will be updated on a weekly basis. Rankings of the list will be based on a number of factors not based on just one video’s performance. T
he metric will include Streams on YouTube Music , views on a song’s video on YouTube, and how often the song is used in user-generated content on YouTube.
There will be four official charts for each of the three countries:
- Top 100 Songs: The most played songs (including the official music video, official song UGC and lyric videos) on YouTube over a 7 day period.
- Top 100 Artists: The most played artists on YouTube over a 7 day period.
- Top 100 Music Videos: The most played official music videos on YouTube over a 7 day period.
- Top 20 Trending: What’s new and hot in music now, an external signal to the music industry that a new song or video is connecting with the audience.
“I have seen first hand the impact YouTube has had on the Arabic music industry. There has been a great shift in how artists release their work in terms of production and promotion on YouTube. Artists now experiment with new song formats and use different features to engage with their fans. YouTube Charts will help emerging and established highlight their success and with more than two billion monthly logged in users, YouTube charts will offer a more holistic representation of a song’s performance,“ said Liliana Abudalo, Head of Music for the Middle East and North Africa at YouTube.
“YouTube plays a huge role in an artist’s life, aside from being one of the main revenue generators, YouTube views and analytics have become the main artist positioning indicator. Fo the past couple of years, the general trends has been the markets main indicator for the major releases’ performance followed by the introduction of the specialized music trends which is currently the markets main indicator for how a release is performing. While what’s trending shows a brief snapshot of current releases I believe YouTube puts itself on the front of artist / release analysis by introducing YouTube music charts which will reflect release positioning every week,” added Mohamed Gaber, Vice President of Mazzika Group.
YouTube launched its subscription services, YouTube Music and YouTube Premium in the Middle East and North Africa in 2019, inaugurating the most comprehensive Arabic music library with licensed content from all major labels in the region. Today, YouTube Premium and YouTube Music have more than 50 million subscribers and trialers around the world.
The charts will be updated every week on Sunday and will be available on YouTube Music as well as at charts.youtube.com.
