Hip-Hop Has Officially Dethroned Rock ‘n’ Roll as America’s Most Popular Music

Are you really surprised?

Steve Huff

Jul 19, 2017

If Drake looks smug and Dave Grohl looks a little stricken in the photos above, there’s a good reason: Nielsen tracking indicates hip-hop and R&B have officially become the most dominant form of popular music in the United States for the first time ever.

As HuffPo reports, the reason for hip-hop’s supremacy—25 percent of the retail music market over 23 percent for rock—may not be a big surprise:

The reason for hip-hop and R&B overtaking rock is simple: online streaming. When it comes to album sales, rock continues to dominate, claiming 43 percent of physical album sales and 37 percent of digital album sales.

But R&B and hip-hop have come to utterly dominate the online streaming market, where they make up 29 percent of all songs streamed online ― that’s almost the exact same amount as rock and pop combined.

So if you’re still getting your tunes from a record store—and since vinyl’s actually coming back in a limited way, apparently those aren’t dead yet—you may not even realize just how huge hip-hop and R&B truly are now.

And hitmakers like Drake, Kendrick Lamar and Migos have Spotify and iTunes to thank for that.

Hip-hop artists can’t rest on this, though—HuffPo also notes that their current dominance “was helped by the release of more than a few dominant albums between January and June, like Drake’s ‘More Life,’ Migos’ ‘Culture,’ Future’s ‘Future’ and Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Damn.'”