Within the Spanish cluster, English quickly lost ground—from 25% of hits to 14%—as native artists like Bad Bunny and Rauw Alejandro became internationally ascendant. Among the local-language cluster, in countries with strong, indigenous music cultures—like Brazil, France and Japan—English declined even more precipitously, dropping from 52% of hit songs to just 30%. Only in the English cluster did the language remain unfazed, dropping only slightly from 92% to 90%.
There is no doubt that, despite its decline, English is still king. Of the 50 most-streamed tracks on Spotify over the past five years, 47 were in English. And the genres it incubated are being widely adopted elsewhere. There is now excellent rap available in Arabic, Russian and, of course, Spanish.
Be sure to check out the very bottom of the article, where you can sample hundreds of songs categorized by country and language.