The Most Popular Music Genres in the UK by City

By Dom Smith
By June 24, 2017 Listen, News

With the rise of streaming services like Spotify, it’s now easier than ever to look at the genres that the public most listen to. In this article, we might just surprise you with the most popular musical genres that people in the UK seem to love. Spotify recently released figures that broke down the most popular genres in each major city in the UK. Before we continue to assess these, we should first note that this information is not 100% accurate as we can’t properly count those in the UK that listen to music via more old-school methods.

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If we start off with the punk genre, this is unsurprisingly the most popular in Belfast. The home of Stiff Little Fingers and other rebellious bands, this city revolted through punk and it’s still popular to this day. Less predictably, cities like Newcastle and Aberdeen are also popular cities for this genre.

EDM is the most popular in London, where clubs bang out this music all night long. This city is where EDM has the most day to day plays, with massive playlists being enjoyed around the clock. The second runner up for this genre’s plays is Dundee, which most of us wouldn’t expect either.

As a stark contrast to punk, the other big genre in Belfast is jazz. York also has a passion for jazz music according to this study, followed closely by Liverpool. These cities are perhaps not what you would expect to be jazz fans, but then again is there any city that totally aligns with their musical genre?

Indie music is popular just about everywhere but the city that listens to it most is Coventry. This is quickly followed by university rivals Oxford, which also enjoys this genre. This is undoubtedly one of the more popular recent genres in the UK and is most enjoyed by 18 to 24 year olds. If you love this genre too then you can enjoy the combination of music and bingo sites with the indie Spotify playlists that you love and a few cards. All you need to do is print off your cards and then watch out for those stereotypically indie moments.

Moving onto the hip hop genre and England holds all of the top cities for this genre. Top city for this genre is Birmingham, followed by Coventry and then Milton Keynes. This genre doesn’t appear as popular in either Scotland, Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland. This could simply be because those in other areas of the Isles are using another service like Tidal for their hip-hop though.

Country music is most popular in the Celtic areas of the UK, with Belfast, Aberdeen and Glasgow the top cities in this genre. These are the cities that enjoy this music and appear to also play a mix of other movies. As the hosts of festivals like Celtic Connections, this is not too out of the blue.

Coventry appears again when we take a look at the metal genre, as it tops the charts here too. Birmingham follows next and Stoke on Trent is the third most popular city for this genre. This means that Birmingham and Coventry seem to love metal and hip-hop in equal measure, which is quite the mix!

These musical genres seem to be all over the place, according to Spotify. It just shows how eclectic and interesting our different tastes in music can be, even those who live in the same city can have vastly different views. Some of the more eclectic genres mish-mash in ways we couldn’t have even imagined!

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