I’m an American, but I mostly listen to European electronic music, especially German, Scandinavian, and French artists. What’s the creative culture like inn our country? Americans often seem to spend most of their time working, and weekends working on yard work, second jobs, or just watching TV. Sometimes I’m listening to a track and I like it, it’s unique and well made, and I wonder if an American artist made it. Invariably it’s a European artist. Paul Oakenfold is British, Armin Van Buuren is Dutch, Tiger Stripes is Swedish, Stromae is French, and so forth. My listening palette is extremely unusual for an American, most of whom only seem to listen to rock and pop.
Comments
Lately Dutch language music is becoming very popular. There are so many new artists emerging. There is a subgenre called smartlappen or levenslied which used to be as associated with lower educated/working class people. Really a niche thing. Nowadays its quite mainstream and singers are fairly well known and earning good money with their gigs. Last year Dutch language music dominated the most streamed music on spotify for example.
Here the damn Reggaeton is everywhere. Spotify Top 50 is 90% Reggaeton.
unfortunately for me, i mainly listen to metal and in Italy we haven’t got much of it, the majority of bands i listen to tend to be northerner westerner europe, but i also listen to bands from oceania, asia and the american continent. i feel like in Italy, when it comes to music, we’re not very open, people tend to listen to music only in Italian, spanish, french, portuguese and english, and recently also korean, just like in the rest of the west, we tend to remain in our cultural bubble
We have many types of traditional Irish music. Sean-nós, folk, rebel, and country. Then, more modern forms of music are Irish hiphop, rock, and metal.
Sean-nós : https://youtu.be/xTJmjY8bqLk?si=hrb3SkOF76ciaFlT
Folk : https://youtu.be/_o_oC22fs84?si=cRb3K7GcgPbyw429
Rebel : https://youtu.be/FPpTR00jipM?si=VEgEH-QF6jk4Er_o
Country : https://youtu.be/YlbI3kxCrxA?si=tpttcnzEzumPzj1q
Hiphop : https://youtu.be/-b9GQ_nm9pc?si=qaeq-nBBcdT3LTbs
Rock : https://youtu.be/6Ejga4kJUts?si=CFaKIIVfZvNz_zCN
Metal : https://youtu.be/AXRoPt8TRvQ?si=-lOuK9UuMFd1M7tK
[deleted]
Stromae is French???? Whoah my friend! Fact check required. Saw him sitting in my local brasserie recently and it wasn’t in France.
I’m British living in another European country so that combination keeps my musical taste well sated.
As another user mentioned, Dutch language music has been on the rise in recent years. We also have a very big electronic music scene, with techno and harder styles (hardstyle, gabber, frenchcore, etc.) being the dominant genres within the broader scene. Defqon1, the world’s biggest harder styles festival, takes place here as well. We also have some big (tech)house producers.
I think it depends on the genre. I love rock and metal so I listen to a lot of American and British bands. There are some successful bands from other parts of Europe – Finland, Netherlands and Italy for symphonic metal; France and especially Germany have some heavier bands; but when it comes to death metal vs black metal, I’m more into death so I don’t listen to a lot of Swedish bands.
There has been a very active policy to promote French/french speaking art from our gouvernement, for decades.
Radios for example have to air 40% of their music in French, half of which have to be “promising young talent”.
A decent amount of money (never enough) tax breaks, prize money and a decently sized market bring talent from the Benelux and Switzerland.
Like stromae, a decent number of very famous artists in French aren’t French. Belgians had a good run in the last decade but today more and more African artists are getting big.
I mean, I’m pretty out of touch with the mainstream music industry in my own country? I’ll know the names of big celebrities or pop stars and I’m still aware of new music coming out, but for the most part the main scenes I know a lot about/genres I listen to in my own languages (Swedish and Finnish) are metal and hip hop. The Nordic metal scene is quite famous, but I wish I knew more people who liked Finnish rap, it’s really quite good but sadly it’s a genre that’s so focused on wordplay that it loses some of its appeal when you can’t understand it.
Finnish pop dominates the market. Most of it quite samey as pop tends to be. Party rap is also popular. Topics are very non-serious and beat super catchy.
Here is the current top five: https://youtu.be/HKFExI7Oo_s?si=M9DRKvZM3O54Kf62
https://youtu.be/JpHLkz_UQ1Y?si=7sxcFerAGigfA-7j
https://youtu.be/p0dpaI-qzas?si=dy3Rt2TYTlw18t2V
https://youtu.be/mTz4Mz5es-g?si=hebQw2mEE6B6IYT2
https://youtu.be/WK3HOMhAeQY?si=J3cCqZNS60Z40tFy
Party rap: https://youtu.be/hUnd1E2-un8?si=1V1JEid5GKK0JT7q