The Spotify and Apple Music of this world seem to benefit less and less music from here. The proportion of Quebec artists who carve out a place for themselves is diminishing year after year, and 2024 was no exception to the rule.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
Quebecers have never listened to so much music on streaming platforms (streaming). If the trend continues, 30 billion songs will have been listened to on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Audio or others in 2024 in the province, according to the Institute of Statistics of Quebec.
But there you go. The proportion of Quebec artists in this deluge of musical bytes has never been so low. Only 6.8% of the tracks listened to by Quebecers on the various music platforms were songs by local artists.
When you take the weekly percentages and plot them on a graph, it reads like the electrocardiogram of a patient in the intensive care unit.
On a few rare occasions, the share of artists from Quebec exceeds 10% of total listening in the province. We observe these bursts during the holiday season, as well as on national holidays. The death of Karl Tremblay on November 15, 2023, also sparked a wave of listening to Quebec music that week. Les Cowboys Fringants also continued to dominate, in 2024, the charts for musical listening to artists from Quebec.
But the general trend is downward. In April 2024, Quebec musicians represented barely 6.1% of total listening, a historic low since the data was compiled.
“A good week, for [un artiste québécois]that’s 100,000 listens,” says Dominique McGregor, research coordinator at ADISQ. “It’s fabulous!” But every week, [les grands noms de la musique pop anglophone] have 400,000 or 500,000 listens in Quebec. »
The 2024 rankings for online listening
ADISQ provided The Press the list of the 10,000 most listened to pieces in Quebec over the past year. The data measures what is broadcast on 11 platforms, from the most well-known (like Spotify) to the most obscure (Audiomack or Slacker), in 11 markets in Quebec (from Gatineau to Saguenay, including Montreal and Quebec).
If we find in this list 1155 French-speaking songs (622 from Quebec and 533 from elsewhere), there are only 782 Quebec songs (622 in French and 160 in other languages) among the 10,000 which were the most listened to in Quebec in 2024.
PHOTO OLIVIER JEAN, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Charlotte Cardin during the 46e ADISQ Gala, last November
The first Quebec artist is Charlotte Cardin, whose song Confetti arrives at 36e rank. However, this is an English song. You have to wait until 49e rank to see a piece appear in French in the list. It is America criesCowboys Fringants.
Consult weekly data on the consumption of musical recordings since 2006 (Institut de la tourisme du Québec)
