the crowd has spoken: hip-hop owned the 2010s and pop got left on read

ok so the internet has decided to reopen the most dangerous group chat of all time: which music genre actually ran the 2010s. not which one you liked, not which one your cousin played at the wedding, but which one best captured and shaped global culture, across reach, innovation and every screen you looked at. the results are in, and hip-hop is standing on the table holding the aux cord like a trophy.

before anyone types "source??" in all caps, the receipts look pretty good. according to Wikipedia's write-up of hip-hop, Forbes reported in July 2017 that hip-hop and R&B had overtaken rock as the most consumed music genre in US history. then there's trap, the hip-hop subgenre with the rattling hi-hats you can hear in your sleep. it went mainstream in the 2010s and spread into Ariana Grande, Beyoncé and Rihanna records, plus reggaetón and K-pop. that's not just winning your own lane, that's renovating everyone else's.

the other sides came with receipts too. dance and pop surged during the decade and Electronic dance music hit mass commercial success (yes, the drop era, we all lived through it). meanwhile the Korean Wave and social media drove K-pop's international popularity, which, if you've ever seen a fandom trend a hashtag at 4am, you already knew. one caveat worth saying: none of these sources ranks the five genres against each other directly, and most of the hard numbers are US charts. so the crowd is doing the ranking itself.

and the crowd is not being subtle about it. on Morfi's opinion market, hip-hop sits at 30% consensus, with pop trailing at 19%. also on the ballot: 3 other sides. so far 27 traders have put $85,545 behind their takes. reminder for the people in the back: those percentages measure how strongly the crowd backs each side, not what share of people voted for it. and trading opened less than a day ago, so this verdict is very fresh.

my take, and this is purely opinion: the crowd got it right, and pop's second place is basically a self-own. half of the decade's biggest pop hits were wearing trap's hi-hats like a borrowed hoodie. pop didn't lose to hip-hop so much as it slowly became hip-hop and forgot to credit it. that said, i will not hear disrespect toward K-pop stans, who did more unpaid digital marketing in the 2010s than most agencies. if any underdog pulls off a comeback here, my money's on the lightstick army.

what to watch: whether pop's fans show up and close the gap, or whether K-pop's famously organized fandoms decide this is their next project. a market less than a day old can still move a lot. if you've got a hot take about the decade that gave us the drop, the dab and the hi-hat, put some money behind it and join the market on Morfi. the group chat is open.