Original Pilipino Music or OPM bested foreign songs on the list of Filipinos’ most listened tracks on Spotify Philippines this year.
The popular global audio streaming service reported that Filipino artists dominated the list of the most streamed songs. These included hits by December Avenue and Ben&Ben.
The top song for 2019 is December Avenue and Moira Dela Torre‘s “Kung Di Lang Rin Ikaw” followed by I Belong to the Zoo’s “Sana” and then This Band’s “Kahit Ayaw Mo Na.”
The third spot is taken by Ben&Ben’s “Maybe the Night” while Post Malone and Swae Lee‘s “Sunflower” from the “Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse” landed on the fifth most listened song.
Filipinos also landed on local Spotify’s most-streamed artists and most-streamed music groups as well.
The most streamed artists were December Avenue, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Ben&Ben and Ariana Grande.
It is the first time that an artist from the country—December Avenue—has taken the top spot on its annual Wrapped Most Streamed Artist list.
The alternative indie band recently appeared on the first Asia-made Spotify Holiday Single “A Perfect Christmas” with the so-called Father of Philippine Christmas Carols himself, Jose Mari Chan, and other OPM stars.
Meanwhile, the most-streamed musical groups were December Avenue, Ben&Ben, LANY, BTS and BLACKPINK.
Spotify recently brought back its “Wrapped” feature, an annual end-of-year campaign that announces leading artists, albums, songs playlists and podcasts which defined how people listened and discovered music.
It also lets users rediscover and share the music and podcasts that formed their personal soundtrack for the year.
OPM is not dead
Spotify Philippines said in July that local music content has reached almost 10 billion streams on the audio streaming service.
It also noted that 80% of young Filipinos’ top 20 most discovered artists on the platform were OPM artists.
“Since 2015, more OPM content has hit the number one spot of the Philippines Top 50 chart. IV of Spades, Ben&Ben, Juan Karlos and Moira Dela Torre are some of the artists dominating the local charts,” the report said.
It added that Filipinos prefer listening to official soundtracks as well, citing how KZ Tandingan’s “Two Less Lonely People in the World” incurred an increase in streamings after indie movie “Kita Kita” came out.
Eve Tan, who leads Spotify Southeast Asia’s music culture and editorial team, previously said that it has always been the streaming service’s aim “to be a platform for both artists and music lovers.”
“Apart from that, we also aim to uncover every layer of this rhythmic musical culture which is an important component of today’s mainstream, modern music,” she noted.
“We are extremely excited to see the OPM genre continue to grow and achieve milestones as we connect more artists with fans in the country and beyond,” Tan added.
