Best of 2025, Pt. 2 - Stats and Mixes
Regional stats, most-mixed artists, and a bunch of playlists to pique your curiosity or satisfy your need for a golden beat holiday party
It’s that time again—let’s get nerdy. Er, more so than usual. Note that there are a lot of playlists this week and for convenience I put them all together in Spotify. All of the tracks are available in my main list of yearly songs at Tidal, YouTube, and Deezer.
Regional stats
This is not-so-secretly my favorite part of the year-ends, where I tally up stats for regional representation for all the mixes I put together this year. 100 countries or territories were represented at least once this year. Here are the regional stats, along with their change from last year.
2025 percentage of tracks across all mixes (change from 2024)
US: 15% (-5)
Western Europe/Scandinavia: 15% (+4)
Asia: 14% (-1)
Latin America: 12% (0)
Africa: 11% (-2)
Anglosphere (UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand): 11% (+4)
International collaboration/Cosmopolitan (multiple regions represented): 10% (+2)
Eastern Europe: 5% (0)
Middle East/Turkey/North Africa: 4% (-1)
Caribbean: 2% (0)
French-Canadian: 1% (-1)
I was not surprised to see US tracks continue to dip in overall percentage of my mixes, but I was surprised to see the percentage of US tracks fall out of a clear first place. The US is now literally a region indistinguishable from most other major regions in my playlists.
If anything, I’m undercounting some of those other regions. African and Latin American tracks have held more or less steady in their overall representation just below 15%, but those two regions are also systematically underrepresented on my mixes, because I intentionally withhold good songs in what I call my “holdover lists” for lack of space each week. The tracks I pull each week from South Africa, Brazil, and Latin America could in each case practically fill up an entire CD-length mix every single week.1
I have an additional 554 songs from Brazil (almost all Brazilian funk), an additional 530 songs from South Africa (various genres of South African house), and an additional 336 songs from Latin America and broader Spanish-language pop (mostly reggaeton and dembow). I create lots of tentative regional holdover lists at the start of the year—this year I started out with additional lists for Caribbean, South Korean, Southeast Asian, and Indian pop—but I didn’t add regularly enough to those to keep it going.2
I may be too self-consciously motivated to pull music from outside the US to be much of a bellwether here. But I can’t help but think that some of the decline in my US representation speaks to the arguments I’ve made in the A-pop series. It was my listening habits, after all, that inspired me to write the series in the first place. The breakdown of what sorts of US music drew my attention seemed comparable to past years.3 The number of tracks are just getting crowded out by other regions’ music.
But which specific regions did better was interesting. My asterisks for South Africa, Brazil, and Latin American pop notwithstanding, the biggest gainers this year were my European and Anglosphere categories. I’ve often lumped Anglosphere and some European pop in with my A-pop musings, but I think I’ve been right to put some daylight between them and the US. (This was the basic argument in the fourth part of my A-pop series about Eurovision.)
Repeat artists
I had a hunch Marina Satti would make my top repeat artist slot. I would not have known that amapiano singer Cowboii also made four appearances on tracks produced by a number of South African house producer heavyweights like MDU aka TRP, Scotts Maphuma, Uncle Waffles, and a new-to-me favorite from this year Shauunmusic. That makes him similar to Mc Gw in Brazilian funk last year, a major utility player vocalist.
At the beginning of the year, Bb trickz was my odds on favorite of having the most appearances, but she started spouting reactionary bullshit in interviews so I needed some time away. Let’s see if she grows up—hopefully yes, hopefully fast.
Other threepeats: Ukrainian star GRISANA, Martinican shatta star Maureen, my amapiano producer of the year by volume (apparently?) Nandipha808, and Japanese alt-pop singer/rapper xiangyu, who does a lot of interesting South African crossover.
Four appearances:
Cowboii, Marina Satti
Three appearances:
Bb trickz, GRISANA, Maureen, Nandipha808, xiangyu
Two appearances:
031 Choppa; ALT BLK ERA; Ari Falcão; badactress; Bamby; Busta Rhymes; Cheyada; chi; Debby Friday; DJ Kawest; Dj khalipha; DJ Koze; Dj Narciso Rsproduções; DVTR; Eftalya Yağcı; Heidi Montag; Ice Spice; Jane Remover; Japanese Breakfast; JAZZWRLD & Thukuthela; Junior & DJ SAURIER; Leyla El Abiri; MaWhoo; MC BF & DJ YUZAK; MC Rodrigo do CN; MC Yallah; MDU aka TRP; Naarly; Nelly Furtado; Nia Archives; Noura Mint Seymali; Param; PinkPantheress; pinponpanpon; Qing Madi; Sawa Angstrom; Sayuri & Sopholov; Scotts Maphuma; SEREBRO; SIMONA; Skay da Deejay, King Tone SA, & Thesiix; Sofía Reyes; Son of Ika; Sw@da & Niczos; Theodora; Titi; Tommy Genesis; underscores; Vanyfox; Yumi Zouma; Yuri; Ляна; ТУЧА
Two different artists with identical names: Myra (France) and Myra (Norway)
Mixes
And finally, a few regional and genre mixes. These only feature songs I’ve shared on my mixes over the course of the year, and are not necessarily representative of anything but my own tastes. These mixes also do not include any of my 100 tracks of the year, which will get their own week at the end of the month. I mean, can you imagine if a music publication put out a bunch of regional and genre lists and just recycled the stuff they’d already published??
Asian Pop
This is the first year where I could keep up with multiple Asian countries’ scenes with the same sense of bewildering overload that I have approached J-pop or K-pop for a much longer time: that is, without having to look very hard for good songs. As for the heavyweights: Japanese pop has been incorporating more global sounds, especially from Nigeria and South Africa. K-pop, in what people who follow K-pop culture assure me was a very weak year, nonetheless seemed to hold as a center of gravity while American chart-pop stalled out completely. I tried to include signs of accelerating ferment from a number of global competitors: experimental and mainstream pop both soaring in Vietnam, budots going megaviral and blending into girl group pop in the Philippines, and continued development of rap and pop scenes in Thailand.
Eastern Europe
For the third year in a row I have a strong Eastern European mix of music mostly from Poland and Ukraine, with a bit of expansion into Romania (including viral sensation and mix lead-off “Dame Un Grrr”), Belarus, Czech Republic, and Slovakia. I only have light impressions based on previous years, but I’d say Ukraine has been steadily locking in to more mainstream pop sounds while Poland has stalled out a bit on the hyper-pop/street rap front but has a pretty diverse jazz and pop landscape to compensate.
South Africa
The massive collections of South African house that I peruse each week—mostly amapiano, gqom, Afrohouse, and 3-step—swamp any other music from South Africa I might come across, especially its rap scenes. So in whittling the stuff that made my mixes from 4+ hours to a CDR-length runtime, I gave special dispensation to things that strayed a bit from the median house subgenre track (and were usually shorter). I think it’s a nice cross-section and plays well as a mix: Moonchild Sanelly on a quantum sound track, Busta Rhymes trying out an amapiano feature, a bit of R&B-leaning pop crossover and hard-to-categorize rap, and a Spongebob Squarepants tie-in from Zee Nxumalo that’s better than Ice Spice’s tie-in (“BIG GUY PANTS OK”) but not as a good as Zee Nxumalo’s McDonalds tie-in from last year.
Middle East, Turkey, and North Africa
This was the first year I had a strong mix of Middle East and surrounding regions (I include Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt in this region in my stats) without needing to rely too much on ringers and recommendations. It is mostly Turkey and Egypt with some diaspora representation (opens with Swedish-Iraqi rapper Nayomi, includes Iraqi-American indie artist nayoor). You’ll hear the global omnidirectional turn—Turkish and Algerian amapiano-informed pop, Arabic hypertrap and reggaeton, and at least one or maybe two songs that sound like Ween.
Golden Beat Holiday Party
This is a generally tasteful (though I can’t vouch for all languages) and heavily Golden Beatology-stacked 50-song assortment of global pop, psych, jazz, and atmospheric music designed to playlist a cocktail party. Starts upbeat, gradually chills out, and then nods off at the end.
That’s it! Next week, I’ll either do my songs of the year or force myself to take on a few albums.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
I could have made the same number of mixes this year with songs only from South Africa. The total runtime of my year-end playlist is 57 hours, and I have 55 hours just of South African house music that didn’t make my mixes.
As a genre experiment, I also pulled aside anything that struck me as windowpane this year. That list comprises 426 tracks, but I wouldn’t say I like most of the music on it (that is, it’s not really a “holdover” list because the songs didn’t have much chance of making a mix to begin with). I also noticed that either the sound itself or my interest in the sound waned as the year went on.
Back of the envelope stat check sez: 25% indie, 17% rap, 14% pop (non-art-pop variety), 13% hyper-pop/art-pop/dance, 11% jazz/noise/psych, 11% country/americana, and 8% R&B.
“Heidi Montag; Ice Spice; Jane Remover” …the stars are all here!