Music

What Does Spotify Wrapped Say About the Region’s Listening Habits?

BYYassine Hariss

December 11, 2025

As the Maghreb rediscovers rap, chaabi, and raï, and the Levant falls back under the spell of Fairuz, the Gulf, on its side, appears to be tuning in elsewhere. In the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the latest Spotify Wrapped data suggests listening trends in the two countries to be leaning away from home-born repertoires altogether in favor of more Western-facing sounds. According to the 2025 Spotify Wrapped, an annual year-in-review that allows users to view a summary of their listening habits over the past 365 days, this year’s most-streamed artists in the UAE and Saudi Arabia make that trend unmistakably clear.

In the UAE, of the 10 most listened-to acts of 2025, eight happen to hail from the United States, three from India, and not a single one from the region, or from the federal monarchy itself. The same pattern repeats across songs: nine of the year’s top 10 tracks are of US provenance, with the lone exception belonging to K-pop singer Jin. Albums follow suit. Of the 10 most streamed records of the year, only three fall outside the American orbit— and all three arrive via South Korea.

Taken together, the figures seem to be pointing at a listening culture not only oriented westward, but structurally tethered to it. This is likely because the UAE is a demographic outlier: nearly 90% of the population are expatriates, leaving Emiratis as a numerical minority in their own country and listening marketplace; which could explain the overwhelming dominance of imported sound.

But even with that context, one question refuses to go away. “How is it that the UAE has effectively become the epicenter of the Middle East’s music industry— hosting the majority of influential figures and major labels, and serving as the base for most of the 2025 Billboard nominees— yet not a single local, nor even Arab, artist appears in the country’s own top 10?” asks Sami Bennani, ex-A&R and expert in music business across the MENA region. “Does this imply that the market itself does not even consume the product it distributes? It is here that a troubling paradox emerges—one for which I have, frankly, no clear answer. What exactly is happening?” he adds.

This consumption logic is not confined to the tiny Gulf state alone as Saudi Arabia seems to mirror similar sonic dynamics. In the Kingdom’s case, the charts are split along linguistic and ethnic lines, producing four distinct lists: top Arab artists, top Arabic songs, top artists, and top songs. A closer look, however, suggests that the latter— these unqualified rankings— do in fact include Arab acts, functioning less as exclusionary categories than as general hierarchies.

If anything, the disconnect exposes a system that welcomes Arab presence symbolically while sidelining it in measurable terms. Among the Kingdom’s top 10 artists of the year, only one is Saudi, and within the top 10 songs, just two originate from Iraq—the rest are American. Album-wise, not a single Arabic-language record made the cut. And while the UAE’s imbalance can be partly traced back to demographics, Saudi Arabia offers no such justification. Which leaves us wondering: is this westward tilt simply a case of modern-day occidentalism, or is it being shaped by forces we haven’t yet named or fully understood?

An explanation for such West-leaning listening habits in Saudi Arabia could be that music, as an art form, was heavily — if not outrightly — banned for decades, meaning that when formal restrictions were finally lifted, notably upon Mohammed Bin Salman’s ascent to the Kingdom’s throne, young listeners naturally gravitated towards what was most popular and most discoverable, read: whatever social media algorithms were already pushing forward (predominantly Western artists, trends, and sonic reference points). Add to that connectivity levels that rank among the highest in the world, and you begin to see how a generation could be swept into a cultural current shaped elsewhere. This could, at a micro level at least, potentially explain the asymmetry at hand.

For contrast, Morocco’s top songs and albums in 2025 do not feature a single non-Moroccan production. In the top-artists list, only two outsiders appear— Jul and Gims— ninth and tenth respectively. It’s only if one wishes to stretch the definition of Moroccan-ness that Morad might be counted, performing primarily in Spanish, yet is of Moroccan descent and proudly positions himself as such.

Meanwhile, in Lebanon, seven of the ten most-streamed songs of 2025 are from Arab artists or sung in Arabic language— spanning Saint Levant, Tamer Hosny, and others. And while the top-artists ranking is also crowded with Western names, several local pillars remain present, including Fairuz, Amr Diab, and Al Shami. Jordan follows a similar pattern: an Arab artist (Amr Diab) tops their 2025 artists list, and nearly half of the top 10 acts—and top 10 songs—are Arab.

So where does all of this leave us? Perhaps at the threshold of a market that is undeniably global in its tastes—one that still leans more on cultural import than export. For a sub-region positioning itself as a future hub for music and culture in the Arab world, this creates an interesting tension between ambition and current listening habits. Meanwhile, other parts of the region continue shaping their own cultural identity, often without the financial infrastructure or production ecosystems the Gulf now possesses. The question, then, is not one of failure but of direction: how long can these parallel trajectories run before they demand a closer reckoning with the imbalance?

What Does Spotify Wrapped Say About the Region’s Listening Habits?

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What Does Spotify Wrapped Say About the Region’s Listening Habits?

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