Cultural Factors and Popular Music on Spotify in Different Countries

Previous research has identified a significant relationship between cultural factors and music listening. The present research seeks to further investigate the relationship between cultural dimensions and national music chart data. Specifically, we consider weekly top 10 listening charts from each week harvested from Spotify across 66 countries for a 52-week period in 2020. Hypothesis 1 proposed that societal individualism scores would positively predict the number of unique artists on music charts. Hypothesis 2 proposed that individualism would negatively predict the number of artists credited on each track. Hypothesis 3 proposed that societal gender inequality would negatively predict the proportion of female musicians. All three hypotheses were supported. Consideration of cultural factors may optimize streaming algorithms and provide future research with a tool for considering societal level differences in how music is perceived and processed.