Exist Yesterday.

Q:I enjoyed last night's flood of international pop. Where are you hearing that stuff? What internet resources are out there for the ignorant like myself?

Honestly, my biggest and most effective resource is typing “[country] music chart 2012” into Google. Even when there aren’t official Billboard-style charts, there are nearly always radio stations that list their most-requested or most-played songs weekly. Then, once I track down a promising song on YouTube, I check out the suggested videos or the videos also uploaded by that user (especially if it’s a label or media entity), and look for stuff with >10,000 plays. Then, having a solid foundation in genre names and slang is particularly helpful, so that I can, say, search “vincy soca 2012” in YouTube and get results for soca entered into this years Carnival at St. Vincent & the Grenadines.

Vevo is also moderately useful, especially checking the Latino and World channels for recently uploaded or newly premiered videos. And of course I’m doing all of this with Wikipedia open in another tab or several (sometimes in several different languages), to check on dates and genres and information that YouTube doesn’t necessarily have (although it frequently pays to check the comments, especially for popular videos in languages you don’t speak; people will often provide rough translations and contextual information).

The Top iTunes Downloads charts are useful for the small minority of nations that have music offered through iTunes. I haven’t figured out a way to make Spotify useful — although it has a lot of global music, you have to know what you’re looking for, and people making playlists called e.g. “Thailand 2012” are generally just loading their favorite 2012 songs into a playlist for a vacation in Thailand: lots of “Call Me Maybe” and “Starships.”

I went down that particular rabbit hole last night for a reason which I’ll hopefully be able to link to soon; it helped that I was looking for stuff that fit a certain profile, so that cool stuff I found that didn’t fit that profile ended up here. More, I hope, will be on its way in another little while.

EDIT: Forgot to mention — you can see all of last night’s posts in order here.